Twas the Week After Christmas
by William Easley
Summary: Christmas, 2015, and though the Mystery Twins don't get to spend the whole time in Gravity Falls, at least their folks allow them to visit for a week. Of course, their Grunkles are away . . . and Soos and his family . . . ah, but Wendy is care-taking at the Shack. What trouble could they possibly get in? Festive Wendip!
1. Chapter 1

_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you._

* * *

 **'Twas the Week After Christmas**

* * *

 **(December 26, 2015-January 3, 2016)**

 **Chapter 1: Holidays and Airports**

Since Thanksgiving, Dipper and Mabel had kept a low profile at home—after all the uproar following Mom's discovery of an, um, indiscreet photo that Mabel had taken of Dipper and Wendy—and Grenda, Candy, and Pacifica!—they didn't want to rock the boat, upset the apple cart, make waves, or lose their chance to spend part of Christmas break in Gravity Falls.

It involved some sacrificing. On December 23, Grunkles Stan and Ford showed up, with their wives Sheila and Lorena, to spend the holiday. Mom gave Ford and Lorena the guest room and put Stan and Sheila in Mabel's room. Mabel offered to bunk in with Dipper, but Dad quickly nixed that idea, so Dipper, with a sigh, took a folding cot down in the basement and let Mabel sleep in his room.

Not that the basement was a bad place to sleep: it had its own little compact bathroom, sink, shower, and toilet. And, except for supports for the floor above, it was mostly a great big open space, with tons of books on shelves against the longest wall. It was a little like sleeping in a library. And with an extension cord and his laptop, Dipper had everything he needed. Mabel could have taken the basement, but she would have needed a refrigerator, and Dad didn't feel in the mood to haul it down the stairs.

From here, both Grunkles and Graunties were going on vacations—Stan and Sheila to Monte Carlo and the Mediterranean for a week, Ford and Lorena to Hawaii, which she had always wanted to see. For the two days before Christmas, the talk was all about that. Also, Stan revealed something that Dipper had wondered about but had never gotten around to asking him: "Yeah, I may drop in at the casino," he said one afternoon. "I had some luck prospecting, so I've got a little money to risk."

"Prospecting?" Alex Pines asked. "You mean, like, for gold?"

"Yeah," Stan said modestly. "Used to be some prospectin' and mining up in the area back in the 1800s. I happened on a kind of cave near a waterfall, and I've taken, oh, a good many ounces of gold out of it over the past six months."

Dipper looked at him, and Stan winked. Dipper thought, _That explains why Stan was always off on little trips last summer!_ It wasn't real prospecting—what Stan was doing was essentially looting the hoard of gold a long-dead old-timey prospector had hidden away in the cave—but nobody else had a claim on it, and as long as Stan filled out the papers and reported his findings, no one would care. Dipper, who had his laptop out, did a quick web search: gold currently was selling for about $1060 per ounce. Knowing Stan, "a good many ounces" probably translated to "Five, ten pounds."

"It's just a hobby," Sheila said, holding Stan's hand. "But it's sure nice that Stanny found one that pays!"

"I like the gettin' outdoors part best, though," Stan said. Dipper nearly rolled his eyes. He remembered when Stan's getting outdoors mostly consisted of driving tourists on the Mystery Tour. But he'd been a good bit more active in the last couple of years. He wasn't as buff as Ford, but Stan had lost some weight, too. Next to him, Alex Pines, though thirty years younger (well, if you didn't count Stan's swig of water from the Fountain of Youth), looked a little pot-bellied now.

Dipper popped up a notepad app and wrote: Reminder to self. _Stay active to keep from getting fat_.

Ford was immersed in a TV show—a nature program about Hawaii, as it happened—and he remained mostly oblivious as his wife Lorena chatted with Dipper's mom. "I'm thinking of retiring," Lorena was saying. "I don't have all my years in, but if I left the full-time job with the library and the Museum of History, Ford and I would have so much more time. And his patents are still bringing in more than we need to live on."

"I only ever worked for a couple of years while Alex was in grad school," Wanda said. "Then the kids came along, and raising them and keeping house turned out to be a full-time job!"

"Well, I wouldn't entirely quit," Lorena said. "The library always needs volunteers, and I could be a volunteer docent at the Museum of History, too. I'd like that, especially since Ford is going to be so busy helping to start a new college near Gravity Falls."

"You mentioned that," Wanda said. "Ford, is this a private school?"

"Hmm?" Ford asked, absent-mindedly. "The ecosystems in those river valleys are astounding! We must hike at least a few—I'm sorry, what did you ask?"

Smiling, Wanda repeated her question. "Oh, well, there will be some governmental support, once everything is up and running," he told her. "But the bulk of the funding is coming from a quasi-private source. We're starting very small, you understand. With luck, we'll open next fall with a student body of one to two hundred students. Graduate level only, granting Masters' and Doctorate degrees—though that's for the future."

"And what's the main thrust to be?" Wanda asked.

"Hm, well, anomalous studies, you know, my own field. We'll tackle the subjects that other schools just give a nod and a wink to. I hope we'll attach scholars internationally, given time. But we'll study cryptids, paranormal phenomena, things other advanced schools ignore."

"Sounds like the kind of place Dipper would want to attend," Wanda said.

"Well, he's welcome, of course—as long as he comes with an earned bachelor's degree, sound test scores, and a strong interest!"

"Oh," Alex said, "I don't think you'll have to worry about that."

And at that moment the front door banged as Mabel, who'd been away all morning visiting three of her friends, came in. "Grunkle Stan! Grunkle Ford! Graunty Sheila! Graunty Lorena! You're here! When do we eat?"

* * *

They ate eventually, at mealtime ("Boo!" said Mabel when her mom broke the news that it was only three PM), and then, as they again sat in the living room and visited, Grunkle Ford suddenly said, "Oh, it slipped my mind—well, almost. Mason, you're still planning to visit Gravity Falls after Christmas, right?"

Dipper glanced at his mom. "Uh, well, yeah. Dr. McGucket says Mabel and I can stay with them—the Shack's closed, and Soos and his family are off on vacation."

"Yes, yes," Ford said with a little show of impatience. "However—and with your family's permission, of course—I would like to ask a favor of you. Fiddleford would do it, but he's wrapped up in an invention he's working on, and I hate to distract him. Would you be able to run over to the Shack once each day to check on an instrument in my lab there? I'll give you a key, and I'll tell you what to monitor. If the instrument should stop recording, or if it should register certain readings beyond normal parameters—don't worry, I've got them written out for you—I want you to call me. Once a day is sufficient, any time you want to go."

"Uh, Mom?" Dipper asked. "Is it OK?"

"If you will be careful," Wanda said. "Don't break anything, and always be sure you've locked the door when you leave. Check twice!"

"OK, sure, I will, then," said Dipper, who knew something his mom and dad didn't know: Though Soos and his family were down in Mexico, for the coming week Wendy was going to be living in the shack—alone—as caretaker.

He wondered if Ford, like Stan, was sneakily arranging some visiting time for him. No, probably not. Ford was too focused on his studies to think of that. Probably.

Ford took Dipper into the dining room and gave him a printed document, complete with photo illustrations. "You know the niche in my upper lab where the prototype Portal stands," he said. "This is right beside that, a small instrument on a high table, about the size of, oh, one of those one-cup coffee makers. It has a USB port on the left side. What you will need to do is to plug in this USB drive—it's formatted already—and the instrument will load the last day—or few days, the first time—of data. Then take the USB to the computer you've used before. You remember the password?"

"Mnemonic_072212," Dipper said. It was a typical password for Ford—the word meaning "a memory aid," plus the date that Weirdmageddon had begun.

"That's right. This print-out explains how to open the program. Once you've done that, then plug in the USB—any port will do—and everything else is automated. The computer will print out a report sheet—you'll see several in this document, so you'll know what they look like. Just add each sheet to the stack in the left-hand top desk drawer. I don't anticipate your having to call me, but you have my computer phone number. Now, if this graph goes above the red line, call me, or if there's a notice of equipment failure. Those are the only two events that would make calling necessary."

"What, uh, exactly is this monitoring?" Dipper asked.

"Well, it's like a seismometer, you know the device that—"

"Measures earthquakes," Dipper said. "I know that much."

"Yes, of course," Ford said, smiling. "This one measures disruptions caused by the Nightmare Realm. Very subtle, and Gravity Falls is one of the few places on Earth where they can be measured. I've monitored them for years now, ever since we defeated Bill Cipher. Sometimes the level of weirdness rises, sometimes it falls—it's in a low state right now—but if the graph ever goes above the red line, that's an indication that the old rift might be leaking forces into our world. Then we'd have to spring into action. Fortunately, so far the highest the graph line has climbed is only two thousand milliweirds. It would have to hit a hundred thousand before there would be any actual danger. My last reading, this morning, showed it at only five hundred and fifteen. Below abnormal, you might say."

"I guess a milliweird is, uh—"

"My own invention. A measurement of background weirdness."

"Gotcha," Dipper said. He felt glad that he hadn't brought up the subject of Wendy after all.

But he couldn't help reflecting that whether Ford had thought of it or not—she would be there!

* * *

Christmas morning came, and though Santa hadn't visited since the twins turned thirteen—now they exchanged presents with their parents and each other—Mabel yelled for Dipper to come down now!

Because there _were_ packages beneath the tree for both! Just as if the old boy from the North Pole had nostalgically decided on one last visit, there they were, one for Mabel, one for Dipper.

"Hang on," Dad said, coming in from the kitchen. "We want to watch you open them."

Wanda, at his side, said, "These are gifts from Alex's uncles and aunts to you."

"I'm gonna die!" Mabel announced, hugging the outsized red-shiny wrapped package with her name. "Get them in here!"

Everyone came to bear witness, and Alex said, "Go. OK if Mabel goes first, Mason?"

"She'd better, or she's gonna explode," Dipper said.

She ripped into the package, squealed, and actually tore the cardboard box to smithereens. "You guys! You didn't! This is so great!"

It was too big to hold up, but Mabel proudly displayed a top-of-the-line karaoke system, capable of accommodating six microphones, with high-end wireless speakers. Dipper whistled in admiration. It had to cost upwards of five hundred dollars. Maybe Grunkle Stan had hauled more than a few pounds of gold out of that cave!

Then it was Dipper's turn, and he felt his heart slam hard when he carefully opened his own package. "I don't believe it," he murmured. "A Tele!"

He held up an electric guitar—a Fender Telecaster, sleek and professional-looking, and for good reason. "This is too good for me," Dipper said.

"Then practice, kid," his Grunkle Stan said. "Until you're worthy of it. Your buddy Robbie Valentino told us what to get, by the way, so ya might want to let him play with it a little if he promises to wash his hands before."

"I'm . . . overwhelmed!" Dipper said.

Most of the other presents were practical—some cold-weather gear for their week in the Falls, new sneakers for Dipper, and so on—but there were some surprises: a movie gift card worth a hundred bucks for both Dipper and Mabel, some books of arcane science for Dipper, a new cell phone for Mabel—her third that year, because she was prone to breakage—and even a special sheath for her grappling hook, courtesy of Grunkle Stan.

As for the Grunkles, each of them got a pass card to the airlines' VIP lounges, plus an outrageous Hawaiian shirt for Ford ("I love it!" Lorena declared) and a miner's helmet and mini-pick for Stan ("for your prospecting") and, oh, too many to catalogue. We'll say that they were all happy and they had a Christmas even Scrooge couldn't complain about.

* * *

The next day, and in two different cars, they ferried everyone to the Oakland International Airport. Ford's and Lorena's plane for Hawaii took off first; an hour later, Stan and Sheila boarded one for New York, their first stop on their vacation; and just after the Pines family had an airport lunch—Wanda warned Mabel to eat light, because she was prone to airsickness, but Mabel held that she had the fun of tasting everything twice, so it was OK—the kids got ready to go to their departure gate. This time they had checked some luggage—the guitar in its case (though Dipper would have to borrow Soos's amps) and the karaoke machine, plus some odds and ends of winter clothing.

"Who's coming to pick you up?" Wanda asked. "Wendy?"

"She said she would," Dipper told her. "She's a safer driver than Dr. McGucket, and his wife doesn't drive at all."

"Remember," his mother said, "she's a friend. Thank her and enjoy her company—but you're not planning to go out alone with her. Right?"

"I got it, Mom," Dipper said. "I won't go on a date with anybody unless at least Mabel is along."

"Same with me and Teek, Mom," Mabel said. "I promise."

"We're trusting you," Mom said.

Mabel hugged her. "Thank you."

Dad said, "Say hi to Wendy for me. If the traffic's not bad, ask her if you can drive her car for a little while. It drives like a dream!"

"OK," Dipper said, grinning. "But she's pretty picky about who she lets drive it."

Then the Mystery Twins trundled their carry-on bags through Security and down to their gate. A final surprise awaited them when they got called to the desk: "Passengers Mason and Mabel Pines."

The airline clerk smiled at them. "I've got your new boarding passes," she said. "Because of the upgrade."

"Upgrade?" Dipper asked. Their tickets had been for business class to begin with.

"Brobro!" Mabel yelled. "Look at this! Grunkle Stan upgraded us to first class!"

Dipper couldn't help grinning like an idiot.

Maybe he'd been wrong.

Maybe Santa had visited them after all. Or maybe—call him Stanta.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: Happy Landings**

* * *

 **(December 26, 2015)**

"Yum," Mabel remarked. "Rich people water!" She poured the Ivien Springs Mineral Water from its little bottle into her cup, swirled it around, sniffed it, made a circle with the thumb and index finger of her free hand, and said, " _Oo-la-la! C'est si bon! C'est tres chic, oui oui."_

"Yeah, it's OK," Dipper said as she knocked the glass back.

She waved the empty bottle and trilled _, "Attendez-moi!_ _Une autre bouteille d'eau, s'il vous plaît!"_

Wincing at her accent, Dipper said, "You know, Sis, if you ever go to Paris, an angry mob will come after you with torches and pitchforks."

The flight attendant brought another bottle of mineral water, but asked, "Are you sure, miss? I think you've had enough already."

"I'll tell you when I've had enough!" Mabel said, taking the small bottle from her. She handed it to Dipper. "Hold this, Brobro. I need to go to the little girls' can again."

She unbuckled her lap belt and made her way back to the first-class restroom, which was only one row behind them. The attendant asked, "Is she always like this?"

"Just after she's had nine bottles of water," Dipper said quietly. "When she gets back, I'll tell her this is the last bottle aboard the plane."

"Thank you, sir!"

Mabel came back after five minutes. "Ugh! I not only peed, I puked! Ever puked into an airline toilet, Dip? You have to be a contortionist! Where's my water?"

"Make it last," Dipper said. "This is the last one they had in the pantry."

"Oh, great," Mabel said, opening the bottle and not bothering with the glass. "A girl could die of dehydration."

"Don't think so," Dipper said. "Not this time. The nose of the plane's slanting down, which means we're probably about—"

The pilot's voice on the P.A. cut in: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Mitchell. We're beginning our initial approach to Portland, Oregon, so I'm gonna ask you to secure your seat belts, close the trays and latch them, and return your seat backs to the upright and locked position. Flight attendants, prepare for approach and landing."

Mabel chugged half the bottle and belched. "It was interesting in the toilet how liquidy it was. Hardly any chunks."

"Too much information." Dipper told her.

"I usually have one of four types of vomit, but this was a new one—"

"I don't want to hear about this," Dipper said. He plugged his earphones into the jack and his ears and turned the volume up loud. It happened to be Babba singing "Mamma Llamo," catchy but not one of his favorites. It drowned out Mabel's re-enactment of her gastronomic adventures, anyway.

They landed, hurried to Baggage Claim, and just like last time, met Teek and Wendy. Lots of hugging and kissing ensued. "The McGuckets are expecting you guys," Wendy said as she pulled out of the airport parking lot. "Expect to get some late Christmas presents!"

"We brought some for them, too," Dipper said. "It's in the big suitcase. And we have some stuff for you and Teek."

"Aw, that's sweet," Wendy said. "I hope you didn't go overboard. I got you guys some small things, nothing great."

"I got something for Teek," Mabel said from the backseat.

"And I've got something for you. But we'll do that later," Teek said.

No snow on the ground in town, but once they had moved out into the open country before the mountains, it appeared, first as patches and streaks, then as a five- or six-inch layer. Thankfully, the roads had been cleared.

"How's life at the Shack?" Dipper asked. He knew from their frequent texts and chats that Wendy had moved in on December 24, when the Ramirez family had gone off to Mexico until the first week in January.

"Meh, lonely, dude. Everything all buttoned up for the winter. I'm the caretaker, but there's practically nothing to do 'cept feed Waddles and Widdles, eat, sleep, read my magazines, and watch TV. Couple-three years ago, that would've been like my dream life, but nowadays I get bored."

"Uh, we can visit you," Dipper said. "Great-uncle Ford wants me to check an instrument every day for him."

"Yeah, he mentioned something about that," Wendy said. "Cool! I got an idea—I'll run over and get you in the mornings, and we can run back to the Shack together."

She was being literal. Wendy was the one who'd talked Dipper into running for exercise, which led to his success as a member of the Piedmont high school track team. "Sounds great," he said, grinning.

"Wendy, Dipper and you aren't supposed to be together alone," Mabel reminded her.

"So? I'll be with Dipper, and he'll be with me. See, we won't be alone."

Sounding impressed but still not convinced, Mabel said, "I don't think that's how it works."

Teek suggested, "You could run with them."

"I don't know," Mabel said. "Sounds like pointless exercise to me."

"I can meet you at the Shack."

"Done deal!" Mabel said. "Maybe it'd be good for me. I've put on a few pounds since Thanksgiving."

"You're not fat," Teek said loyally.

"I'm not skinny!" Mabel shot back. "OK, Wendy stop at the mall before you take us to the McGucket mansion, please. I've got some Christmas money, and I'll need some running clothes!"

"You got it, girl," Wendy said. "Dip, you ready for track season?"

"As much as I'll ever be," Dipper said. "I'm back right around my personal best. There are some awfully good runners in our district this year, though, so I may not do as well as when I was a freshman." Owing to an injury in his sophomore year, Dipper hadn't equaled his first season on the JV team.

"We'll keep you in shape," Wendy promised.

"So," Mabel piped up. "What weird thing's happened in the Falls?"

"Weird, weird," Wendy murmured while slipping into the freeway traffic. "OK, there's this—just before Christmas, I think on the twenty-third, 'cause the next day he and the boys went off on their camping trip, my dad caught a glimpse of Gompers on Yikes Peak. That's odd because Gompers always hung around the Shack, and he's been missing since, like, Thanksgiving. Dad says it's a well-known sign of bad luck when a goat abandons a house, like a rat leaving a sinking ship."

"I never heard that," Dipper said.

"Probably 'cause it's an old legend that Dad just made up. He does that a lot of times."

"Grunkle Stan wanted us to try to find Gompers," Mabel said.

"Well . . . sort of," Dipper agreed. Actually, Grunkle Stan could take Gompers or leave him. Nobody owned the goat—he'd just showed up at the Shack one day a long time back, when he was just a kid, and ever since he'd hung around the place. Half the time, Stan was touting him as the world's strangest hybrid, with the head and forelegs of a goat and the hindquarters of a goat, _but not the same goat!_ Once or twice he'd even given the rear end of Gompers a dye job to make it seem more plausible.

The other half of the time, Stan was complaining because Gompers would eat absolutely anything at least once—cans from the garbage, leftovers, pizza boxes, underwear, sweaters, you name it, he'd at least try it. That quality endeared him to Mabel, but it got on Stan's nerves.

"Come on, Broseph!" Mabel urged. "Let's mount an expedition! Operation Get Your Goat! Yikes Peak isn't far! Uh, Wendy, how far is Yikes Peak?"

"'Bout nine, ten miles from the Shack. You can't drive there, you have to hike in from a spot off a logging road, maybe three miles uphill through some woods."

"Well, what's a goat, anyways?" Mabel asked. Then for a moment she was silent before yelling, "All right! The guilt would kill me! I can't help it, it's my nature! We gotta get Gompers back, Dipper! He's married to Waddles!"

"That union isn't official," Dipper said. "And you did it just because you wanted to shoot a video."

"Anyway, come on, you have to help. You did promise!"

"I guess I did. Wendy, can you come along as guide?"

"Sure, man! Like I told you, sitting around in the Shack all day with nothing to do is driving me bonkers. I don't have to stay in the place 24-7 to take care of it. It mostly takes care of itself."

They were running into mountainous country, the Columbia River off to their left, bluffs to their right, hiding the snow-packed Mount Hood from sight. Wendy talked about the sights they really ought to go see next summer, several waterfalls (Bridal Veil, Multnomah, Wahkeena, and some others), some scenic stretches of the river, Glacier Lake, some other beautiful spots.

"We'll plan a road trip or two next summer," Wendy promised. "Get us out of the Valley for a few days. We'll see the sights."

In the backseat, Teek's and Mabel's conversation had died down to giggles and whispers. Dipper reached over to Wendy and touched her neck—easy with her shorter hairstyle—and sent her a thought via their touch-telepathy: _I don't think they're listening to you, Wen._

– _Guess not, Dip. Oh, well. We'll get to the Falls in time for an early dinner. I'm about sick of my own cooking and I've been craving pizza. OK with you if we stop?_

 _Yeah, sure, and pizza's always OK with Mabel. So tomorrow you want to take us to Yikes Peak to see if we can pick up Gompers's trail?_

– _Yeah, sounds fine. You and Mabel are gonna have to buy some serious hiking boots, though. It's a climb. Not rock-face, just steep and mostly bare granite. I don't think you've spent much time in that part of the Valley._

 _We can pick up some boots when we stop for Mabel's clothing. I've got Christmas money too, and I'll help out._

– _Good deal, and the pizza joint is right at the mall. Dipper—are you thinking naughty thoughts?_

 _Just daydreaming. You look so mature without your long hair. I don't mean bad, it's good on you, but different. I can tell it's already grown out a little just since last month, though._

– _Wait'll you see it next June! Shoulder-length or longer. You like it better long?_

 _I like it any way, Magic Girl. I guess it's just always been long._

– _I'll grow it long enough to wrap both of us. Keep us warm at night._

 _Please don't do that when we're in the car. Let's save it for alone time._

– _You are such a sweet dork!_

 _Yeah, I'm a dork. But I'm your dork._

– _Damn straight, man!_

"Whoa," Mabel said as they crossed over a pass. "Welcome to the North Pole!"

Not quite, but eight inches of snow covered the ground, blinding white "Not s'posed to have any more until the weekend, maybe," Wendy said. "If we're gonna go to Yikes Peak, we at least won't have to do it in a snowstorm."

"When do we leave?" Dipper asked.

"Mm, ought to go early, 'cause three miles uphill is no joke in freezing weather. I'd say plan to leave the Falls at nine, we'll get to the pull-off probably around nine-thirty. Hike up to the shoulder of the mountain, get there by eleven, should be warming up. Then we'll scout around for Gompers. I think if we spot him, he'll come to Mabel."

"Yeah! 'Cause I give him unconditional love!" Mabel proclaimed.

"No, 'cause he loves to chew your sweaters."

"That too!" Mabel said.

They made the turn, and then the next one, and before long they took the one road into the Valley. Wendy slowed. "Look up, guys."

Dipper ducked and stared upward through the windshield. Where the old railroad trestle had once spanned High Bluffs, now a bright, gleaming bronze framework had been built. They had even started on the sign—in big red aluminum letters, the partial word _Weclom._

"Weclom?" Dipper asked. "Is that supposed to be 'Welcome'?"

"Yep," Wendy agreed. They're gonna redo it, but it's not the company's fault. Guess who wrote out the copy for the builders?"

"Deputy Durland," Dipper guessed, getting it in one try.

Wendy drove under the partly-finished sign, and they were back in the Falls and heading toward Gravity Malls. And to Dipper it felt like coming home.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3: Getting the Goat**

 **(December 27, 2015)**

* * *

Sunday was clear and a little warmer—the temperature at eight that morning was a balmy 38—and the determined Mabel donned her new running togs and shoes and joined her brother and Wendy for a brisk four-mile run to the Shack.

She stopped running after half a mile. "You guys jog on," she gasped. "I'm gonna walk a little ways. Meet you at the Shack!"

"I didn't think she'd hold out," Dipper said to Wendy as they detoured to Circle Park to make their run exactly four miles. They weren't even running hard—just jogging—but before long they left Mabel behind. Dipper realized his sister wasn't going to do the Circle Park thing, but take a straight shot, making the distance closer to two and a half miles.

Once on their own, Dipper and Wendy picked up their pace and ran a little faster, enough to warm them up. "I don't know if she'll even be up for the goat hunt," Dipper said.

"I dunno, man," Wendy answered. "She's super-motivated when it comes to animals."

Yes, Dipper would concede that. They circled the water tower, came back to the street, and then made the turn toward the Shack. A little early traffic cruised, and some of the drivers recognized them and waved at them. They took the slow uphill grade out of town, reached the Mystery Shack driveway—it had been shoveled or sprinkled with melting compound and was clear of snow, but an icy-hard eight-inch layer of the white stuff lay on the lawn on either side—and then they walked up the drive to the parking lot, getting their wind back. "Whoo!" Wendy said. "That felt good, Dipper."

"It did," he said, smiling. "I think I could be the state champion this year if you could come down and coach me!"

Wendy laughed, her breath condensing into pale clouds of vapor. "Wish I could. So, from what you say, the new track coach is hard to get along with?"

"He's not _new_ ," Dipper said. "Well—new to me, 'cause it's the Varsity team this year. But he's been Varsity track coach for ten years or so. He's big on discipline and training, and he's stern, and he hardly ever hands out compliments or praise, but I guess he's OK. He sort of makes practice feel like boot camp because—whoa!"

Wendy had taken out her key, but the door flew open, and a grinning Mabel said, "Thought you guys would _never_ get here!"

"How'd you beat us?" Dipper asked, suspicion heavy in his voice.

"Phsss! Got my second wind!" Mabel said. "Come on, I made coffee!"

They got inside, peeled off their sweatshirts—both Dipper and Wendy wore long-sleeved t-shirts underneath—and left their wet running shoes beside the door. Dipper could smell the coffee, and he hoped that Mabel hadn't laced it with any foreign objects, like plastic dinosaurs.

He and Wendy took charge of making breakfast—scrambled eggs and cheese, sourdough toast, strips of turkey bacon, and hash-brown potatoes—while Mabel laid out the plates and tableware. Wendy asked, "Seriously, Mabes, how'd you get here first?"

With a modest grin and a shrug, Mabel said, "Well, you know, when you're running and you're out of breath and then that good old second wind hits you—"

"Mabel!" Dipper said in a warning voice.

"—that's when you hitch a ride!" Mabel finished triumphantly. "Pacifica and her boyfriend had breakfast downtown, and I saw 'em coming in her car and flagged 'em down and they dropped me off at the Shack."

"Oh, Pacifica and the vampire," Dipper said. "How's that whole thing working out?"

'Danny is a _reformed_ hot vampire!" Mabel said. "Well, they're fine, I guess, but he was all grumpy-grumpy because she's put him on a diet. He's porked up a little bit, ten pounds or so."

"Guess it's the change in diet," Wendy said, dividing the scrambled eggs among the three plates.

"Yeah, he says that switching from blood to regular foods is hard, 'cause he hadn't eaten in like a hundred years, almost. But Paz will get him into shape."

Dipper distributed the bacon and toast. Wendy came back with the skillet of hash-browns. "Everyone eat up," she said. "We'll have a late lunch after we get back from our goat hunt. I'll take some gorp along for the hike, just to tide us over."

Before she sat down, Wendy brought a pint-sized glass Mason jar, the type used by home canners, to the table. "Hey, try some of this on the toast. My Aunt Sallie gave a case of this to us as a Christmas present—her special sour-cherry preserves."

"Sour?" Mabel asked.

"Well—that's the kind of cherry she uses. The jam's pretty sweet," Wendy said as Dipper poured the coffee.

They settled down to breakfast. The sheer amount of jam that Mabel managed to load on a slice of toast amazed Dipper. He settled for about a teaspoon of it and discovered that the spread had both sweetness and tang, delicious with the buttered sourdough bread. "Good eggs, Dipper," Wendy said.

"Good bacon, toast, and hash-browns, too!" he told her. "And the coffee isn't terrible."

"I think Mabel likes everything, too," Wendy said with a grin.

"Can't talk, eating," Mabel said around a mouthful of food.

"I like the jam," Dipper said.

"Thanks. Aunt Sallie makes a lot of different kinds. I like this and the blueberry best."

"It's delish," Mabel said, scooping almost all of the remaining jam on her other slice of toast.

"Sis," Dipper said, "you'd better take a hint from Danny and cut back a little. Seriously, your metabolism won't always run at five hundred per cent!"

"Tell me about it tomorrow," Mabel said. However, she did refrain from her normal second and second-and-a-half helpings.

They washed and dried the dishes, Wendy checked the temperature—all the way up to forty—and they set off for Yikes Peak in her car. "Why do they call it that?" Mabel asked. "Yikes is a guy's name, I guess?"

Concentrating on the winding road, Wendy said, "No, I heard it's because nobody had explored the mountain until the late 1800s. Then one of the Northwests offered a hundred-dollar prize to the first person who climbed to the top of it and planted the Northwest family's flag there. Everybody scrambled to give it a try. It's not so hard until you get close to the peak, and then it's real steep. Anyway, two of the guys who tried to win the hundred bucks were Ronald Flack and Sam Montgomery. They climbed neck and neck nearly to the top, and supposedly, Montgomery yelled, "I win!" and leaped from where he was, way up toward the top, onto the peak itself. Only he didn't know that the far side was a sheer three-hundred-foot drop. He fell right over. The last thing Flack heard him say was 'Yikes!'"

"Was he hurt much?" Mabel asked.

"Fall killed him. But since Flack then stepped, carefully, onto the peak himself, he won the money, and the Northwest who'd put up the prize said he could have the honor of naming the mountain. He decided to name it after Montgomery's last word, which was 'Yikes!'"

"Great-uncle Stanford doesn't record anything substantial about its history in the Journals," Dipper said. "He does mention it and says that killbillies have been reported on the lower slopes from time to time."

"What are they?" Mabel asked.

"Wild men of the hills," Wendy said. "I don't think they're actually human. Probably some kind of Sasquatch relative, but shorter, real skinny, and crazy. Not evil so much as they don't know their own strength, and they love to roughhouse. Trouble is, their roughhousing can land a person in the hospital or the morgue."

"Maybe they kidnapped Gompers," Mabel said.

"Suppose it's possible, Mabes. But they're pretty rare—killbillies, I mean. Never ran into one myself, but Dad's seen a few from a distance. Not around these parts, though. I've heard that way back in the middle 1900s there was supposedly a family of them that lived around Yikes Peak, but they must've died out."

"Is it safe for us, then?" asked Dipper.

Wendy shrugged. "Oh, yeah. Killbillies are nocturnal. Never come out in the daylight."

The winding road—Ellis Ridge Road, according to one sign—led through forested land. Finally, a rough logging trail split off to the left. As Wendy made a careful turn, Dipper could glimpse a sort of oval spire of white rock in the distance. "Is that it?"

Wendy said, "Yep, Yikes Peak. It's probably in the shape it's in because of an ancient glacier. You'll see."

They jounced along the rough logging road, usually through soft muddy stretches, sometimes over lingering snow, for a couple of miles, and then in a weed-spiked clearing, Wendy stopped the car. "All out. We go on foot from here. Mabel, get the bag from the floor back there. It's got our food and water in it."

"Umm," Mabel said. "It, uh, has water in it."

Dipper groaned. "Mabel! Did you eat all our gorp?"

"No!" Mabel said. "Just, uh, that bag of trail mix."

"Dude," Wendy said, "that was gorp! It's a home-made trail mix, high-calorie so just a little would go a long way. OK, Dip and me go hungry, I guess. Let's go."

By then—getting on toward eleven A.M.—the temperature had shot up to the mid-forties, and thankfully, no breeze stirred.

It was cool in the forest, though. However, the dense growth of pines had kept the springy, pine-needle covered ground beneath mostly clear of snow.

They hiked along through the woods, sometimes having to skirt thick underbrush, until the ground underfoot turned rocky, and then became bare stone. Finally leaving the shade of the trees, they stood at the foot of—well, not a mountain, exactly, but anyway a very tall hill, maybe a thousand or twelve hundred foot tall. It was bare whitish-gray granite, rising as if it were a gatepost at the end of the ridge they were on.

From this direction, it was steep, but walkable—like walking up the roof of the Shack to get to Wendy's secret hideaway. A hawk circled very high overhead. That was the only life they saw.

"No snow," Dipper said.

"'Cause this is the southern face," Wendy told him. "Gets full sun, whenever the day is sunny. It's all melted here. Come on."

"Maybe I should wait here and guard our supplies," Mabel said, eyeing the slope.

"You're fueled up," Wendy pointed out. "Get your butt in gear!"

Though sometimes they had to take great care and inch up to a less steep slope, they made their way about a third of the way up-slope and then came to a sort of ledge—not level, but a broad, gently sloping shoulder that they at least could stand upright on. From that height they overlooked the forest spreading out: deep green and white, pines and snow, as far as they could see. Off to the east, beyond the peak, Dipper glimpsed a break in the trees below the ridge, a sinuous valley like a basking snake, that showed where a broad creek or river ran. Straight ahead—to the north—the mountain went on up, in a series of three tiers, to the rounded peak.

Wendy got her breath back and said, "Can't see it from here, but the other side, the north face, is real steep, nearly a sheer drop. That's where the guy fell when he was trying to win the Northwest prize. Looks like an ancient glacier cut through the ridge there and scraped away half of Yikes Peak."

"Like Half Dome," Dipper said. "That's in Yosemite."

"Yeah, I've seen pictures of it. Smaller, but a lot like that. OK, Mabel, try calling Gompers," Wendy said when they had their breath back.

Mabel yelled, "Gompers! Where are you?"

Not even an echo came back.

Dipper, sitting on the sun-warmed rock, gazed upward. "Is that a cave up there?" he asked, pointing to a black spot almost at the summit.

Wendy shaded her eyes. "Don't know. Maybe."

They rested. Then Mabel jumped up. "Listen!" she whispered.

Dipper strained his ears. He heard what she must have heard—a faint "Mehhh."

"Doesn't sound like Gompers," he said quietly.

Wendy shook her head. "That's a pygmy bighorn sheep," she told him. "Subspecies. They only get about as big as a Labrador at most, and the majority are even smaller. They're unique to the valley."

"Where is it?" Mabel asked. "It sounds adorable!"

"Shh."

The bleat came again, no closer, no farther away.

"Can't localize it," Wendy said. "But it's a pygbig, all right."

"A . . . pygbig," Dipper said.

"Short for 'pygmy bighorn,'" Wendy explained. "Folks around here call them that, anyhow. You don't see them down in the lower elevations. Just up on the rocky hills and the cliffs. You'll know it if you see it— brown, with a white rump. If it's a male, it will have, like, fat horns curving around nearly in a circle. Female, short, skinnier horns, not as curved."

Once more, "Mehhh" came to them.

And then a lower-pitched "Baaaa."

"That's him!" Mabel said. "I'd know that bleat anywhere!"

"Drink some water," Wendy said. "Stay hydrated, and we'll go on up and see if we can spot him anywhere."

They all drank from one canteen—Dipper insisted Mabel drink last—and then practically had to drop to all fours to make it up to the next terrace. The sounds of bleating grew louder as they made the ascent.

"Something's moving up there," Dipper grunted, pointing upward. "Where the cave is."

"If it is a cave," Wendy said. Now a shoulder of the next terrace hid most of the dark area—what they could see looked like an upside-down V of blackness on the granite face.

Dipper stared until his eyes watered. Something flickered up there, but he could only see a small part of it and couldn't decide if it was an animal or only a bird. "Mabel, call Gompers again."

Mabel had to catch her breath, but finally she yelled, "Hey, Gompers! It's me, Mabel! The girl everyone adores! Waddles is worried about you. Gommmmmpers!"

And . . . he came to the edge of the next terrace, about fifty feet above them, and stared down at them with his spooky slit-pupiled eyes. "Baaaa?"

"Yeah, Gompers! Mabel! Come on down! I got a big old hug for you!"

The goat bounded down the slope, leaping from perch to perch—to Dipper he looked almost like a fly clinging to a wall—but he made it to their level, walked up to Mabel, and began chewing on her sweater.

She hugged him. "You silly billy! Getting us all worried! Come on home, you big old dum-dum, you!"

"Mehhh."

"There's the sheep," Dipper said, pointing up. The animal, a light tan, was staring over the edge of the next terrace, looking down at them.

"Female," Wendy said. "Uh-oh. I think I know what's going on."

"What?" Mabel asked, still hugging Gompers. "He's lost weight!"

"Well," Wendy said, "bighorn sheep—the ewes, the females, come into season in November."

"You mean people hunt them?" Mabel asked, sounding horrified.

"Not _hunting_ season," Wendy said. " _Mating_ season."

That sank in, and then Mabel's pupils grew huge. "Awww! Gompers is gonna be a dad?"

"I wouldn't get my hopes up," Wendy warned. "Goats and sheep can mate, but if the female gets pregnant, usually it doesn't go to term. They don't have matching chromosomes, see. I think sheep have 54 and goats have like 60. Unless the hybrid lucks out and has 54, it can't survive."

"What? We gotta get Gompers's wife down!" Mabel said. "We'll get her to the vet! Give her the best of care!"

Dipper tried: "Mabel, if the hybrid goat isn't viable—"

"Geep," Wendy said.

"—then it won't—what?"

"The offspring of a male goat and a female sheep is a geep," Wendy explained.

Dipper stared at her. "You're kidding."

"Nope, hand to God."

"Geep!" Mabel said, glowing. "Aw, now we got to get her to the vet! We have to save that adorable geep"

"She's a wild animal," Wendy pointed out. "Ewes aren't as fierce as rams, but they can butt you. I don't think it's smart for us to try to climb up there. If she butted us and we fell, we'd roll a hell of a way down steep rock."

"We gotta try!" Mabel insisted.

"Baaa," commented Gompers.

"Mehhh?" asked the pygbig ewe. She took a tentative step over the edge of the bluff.

"Is she pregnant?" Dipper asked.

"Couldn't tell yet," Wendy said. "They don't give birth until May, usually."

"You guys go down one level," Mabel said. "She'll come to me and Gompers."

"It's dangerous!" Dipper said. "She could attack you!"

"Gompers wouldn't let her," Mabel said. "Come on, please? We have to try!"

"OK," Wendy said. "Come on, Dip. Be careful, Mabes. If you fall, we'll try to catch you. Maybe you'll only lose some teeth and break an arm or a leg."

A reluctant Dipper climbed down to the terrace they had been on when they first heard the sounds. Mabel sat on a little outcrop of rock, petting Gompers. He bleated. The female sheep came down in leaps, but stopped about ten or fifteen feet above Gompers. The two ruminants carried on a bleated conversation.

"Son of a gun," Wendy said. "Look at that."

The ewe came slowly, fearfully down to Mabel's level and nuzzled Gompers. And she let Mabel stroke her neck.

"That's Mabel," Dipper said. "Friend to all the animals."

After a few minutes, Mabel stood, and they heard her murmuring to Gompers. She started down, the goat at her side, the ewe trailing after her, about fifteen feet away. In a calm voice, Mabel said, "I got this. You guys go on ahead. I don't know she'll follow all three of us. Don't worry about me."

"You heard her," Wendy said. To Mabel, a little louder, but still in a soft voice, she said, "We'll stay in sight until we get to the woods, though. And you keep us in sight through the woods, so's you don't get lost."

"OK."

When they had gone down far enough to be able to walk normally again instead of climbing, Wendy took Dipper's hand. – _Not sure about this, Dip. I know Mabes is all about taking care of animals, but the pygmy bighorn's not tame._

 _I've been wondering how we can get her and Gompers back to the Shack._

— _Gotta be in the car. Only other way is to walk ten miles, and I don't think Mabel's up to that._

 _But the sheep might panic, even if we can get her in. You don't have any chloroform in your car, do you?_

— _No, I don't have run-ins with bears like Dad. Guess we just try our best._

They entered the edge of the forest and the air turned colder. They kept glancing back. A hundred yards behind them, the girl, the goat, and the sheep came on, but slowly, the sheep especially hesitant.

"I'm not sure about this," Dipper said.

Wendy began, "I'm not either—"

 _Heee heee haw haw hee!_

The shriek, not close, but coming from the direction of Yikes Peak, made Dipper jump. "What's that?"

"Oh my God!" Wendy said. "Dude—I think that's a killbilly!"


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4: Dingdang Cobblywobber Hee Haw**

* * *

 **(December 27, 2015)**

Whatever the source of the weird sound, it spurred on both the sheep and the goat—they came trotting up to Wendy and Dipper, passed them, and Mabel ran puffing behind them. "What's that?" she asked, her voice panicky.

"Maybe a killbilly," Dipper said. "Can you herd Gompers to the car?"

"I don't think I can stop them!"

Dipper and Wendy let Mabel get ahead of them. Gompers and his sheep companion were already down the trail, and they all hurried to catch up.

They made it to the car a lot faster than they had hiked to the mountain. Wendy opened the back door on the driver's side. "Get 'em inside the car!" she said.

From closer than before came the bizarre laugh, plus a strange gibbering: "Dingdang! Cobblywobber! Reet toot! Aw haw!" The voice rasped Dipper's nerves, a high, screechy sound like fingernails on a blackboard.

"I thought they didn't come out in the daytime," Dipper said.

Wendy had her axe ready. "Man, I didn't think so, either! But that sure sounds like one!"

"Get—ugh—in!" Mabel urged. Gompers set his hoofs firmly and locked his knees, refusing to budge. Mabel tried but failed to pick him up. "Guys!" she said, "I don't think he'll get inside unless the sheep's there first! And she's scared of the car!"

"Hang on," Dipper said. "I think I know how to coax her in. Can you hold onto the sheep?"

Mabel put her arms around the pygbig's neck. "She's trembling so hard! She's scared out of her wits!"

Dipper was dragging Gompers around to the far side of the Dodge Dart. "I don't think sheep have wits," he panted. Holding onto Gompers's stubby left horn with his right hand, he opened the far-side rear door with his left. "Look, Gompers! There's your girlfriend!"

Gompers tried to shake loose, but Dipper held on and forced the goat's head around to make him stare across the back seat at the far door, where Mabel held onto the sheep. Finally, Gompers did glimpse his beloved.

And at the same instant, the sheep saw him. Gompers scrambled into the back seat of the car, trying to reach the sheep of his dreams, but Dipper held onto his rear hoofs. "See—if—she'll—go to him!" Dipper said, grunting with effort.

"Yeehaw goshagolly!" Now the creature was very close, somewhere in the underbrush.

The sheep, seeing Gompers ahead and hearing the killbilly behind, climbed into the car, and Mabel slammed the door behind her. Dipper let go of Gompers's legs and yelled, "Everybody, get in!" He slammed the rear door as the goat and sheep nuzzled each other and bleated.

Mabel tore open the driver's door and clambered into the middle of the front seat. Dipper opened the passenger door and said, "Wendy, go!"

She didn't even look around—she had crouched, axe ready, just in front of the left headlight. "You first—it's too close!"

Dipper closed the door and ran round to the front of the car. "I won't leave you out here alone!"

Wendy was tense, breathing hard. "Sweet, dude, but I got the axe!"

"I don't care!"

From inside the car, Mabel wailed, "Guys!"

"Shh!" Wendy said.

Dipper heard it, very close—slaps and stamps, the unmistakable sound of hamboning.

"I see it!" Dipper shouted. "There it is! It's—wearing _overalls_?"

"They steal 'em," Wendy said. "Out in the country, no clothesline is safe!"

The killbilly looked nearly human but at the same time, not at all human. It had a crazed scrunched, wrinkled yellow monkey-face above a scraggly beard that resembled the Spanish moss Dipper remembered from the time his parents had taken the twins to Orlando, Florida—gray-green, rotted-looking, tangled.

The beard looked like that, but messier. The creature was not just skinny, but emaciated, the forelimbs—arms, Dipper supposed—looking like rawhide wrapped around bones. The feet were huge and flappy, the big toe separate from the others, almost like you see on a gorilla foot. Yellow-brown toenails curved over the ends of the toes, ending in sharp points.

"Gah!" Wendy said. "I can smell it from here!"

The killbilly stopped slapping itself. "Garnsnoggle pashoo winchamuck!"

Dipper nearly gaggled on the foul odor. "Is it talking?"

"Think it's just sounds, like a turkey makes. Don't know if they have a language. What's it doing?"

"I think it's trying to find a way to get at us."

The creature edged out of the woods and sidestepped. Its gait was as inhuman as its looks—with arms out at its sides, elbows bent, long bony fingers pointed down at the ground, it swung its bony knees and then slapped its big feet down hard. The feet were filthy, caked with mud and crossed with fresh and old scars.

Dipper, standing beside Wendy, started to slap his chest and knees.

"Dude!" Wendy said between her clenched teeth.

"Trying to hambone," Dipper said.

"What are you telling it?"

"No idea! But maybe it'll understand we mean it no harm."

The creature's deep-set eyes glared at them. It kept up a low chuckling sound. Then it began to growl and snarl, and strings of gooey pale-green saliva drooled down into its beard. Its breath was even worse than its body odor.

"Back to back!" Wendy said. "It may be distracting us. Could be more behind us!"

Dipper pressed against her, his anxious eyes scanning the edge of the woods. "Don't see any."

"Might be a bluff—look out!"

" _Yeehaw_!"

Wendy jerked Dipper down just in time. The killbilly had leaped, launching itself in an impossibly high arc, and overshooting the two teens, it hit the hood of the Dart. Wendy rolled to her feet and swung the axe. Dipper got up a half-second after her—

" _Yeehee! Haw!"_

The killbilly had caught Wendy's axe just below the head, and the two tugged hard, fighting for it. With a grunt, Wendy leaned back, levering the axe handle, and forced the killbilly off the car hood—but it seemed to have greater strength than even the lumberjack girl, and as it leaped down, it wrenched the axe out of her hands and swung it.

Backward. It held onto the head and swung the handle. Wendy turned with the blow, but the butt of the handle hit her on the side of her hip.

"Hey!" Dipper yelled. "That's my girl!"

He charged. Despite the stench, he grappled with the killbilly. It snapped the heavy axe handle in two and dropped the pieces. Grinning with horrible snaggle teeth through its beard, it turned on him and seized Dipper in a crushing grip. He couldn't breathe—

"Hah!" Wendy delivered a flying kick to the thing's head, which produced a dull sound, like a watermelon being dropped from forty-two feet in the air and striking a slumbering hippo right between the ears. Its head lolled to the side, and Dipper kneed it where, if it had been human, the blow would have hurt.

Instead it snarled and hurled him away, evidently identifying Wendy as the greater threat. Dipper crashed into the passenger door of the Dodge Dart hard, the breath whooshing out of his lungs. He fell half-stunned to the ground.

The killbilly, gibbering, sidestepped, seemingly looking for an opening. Wendy was on her feet, crouched in a defensive position. "Get in the car, Dipper!"

"No," he croaked, pushing himself to his knees. He got up and stumbled toward the thing's back, thinking _If I can get a chokehold_ —

Without even looking around, it backhanded him, striking him hard across the chest, knocking him to the ground again. He saw spinning lights and fought not to lose consciousness.

At the same moment, Wendy crouched and kicked, sweeping its legs from under it. The killbilly hit, rolled right over Dipper, and sprang up, roaring, spreading its arms.

And then something went _thunk!_

Dipper, dazed, saw the thing's eyes cross. It seemed to smile and dreamily muttered, "Dingdang cobblywobber hee haw," and then it fell backward.

" _Now_ get into the car!" Wendy screamed, yanking him to his feet, dragging him to the car, wrenching the door open, and throwing him into the front seat. She grabbed something from the ground, leaped over the hood, and got into the driver's seat, slamming the door so hard the car shook. Wendy reached across Mabel. "Hold this!"

Dipper discovered he was gripping the axe head and a few inches of the broken handle. "What happened?"

"Roll up your window!" Mabel yelled. "Grappling hook, Brobro!"

The killbilly was stirring, rubbing the back of its head. Wendy turned the key in the ignition, and the engine caught at once. Dipper frantically wound the window up. The Dodge Dart tore dirt and grass loose as it spun in a tight turn. "Look out!" Wendy yelled.

The killbilly was on its feet again and swiped at them, like a bullfighter thrusting a lance at the charging bull. Its hook-fingered hand smashed the windshield on Wendy's side, cracking it in a spiderweb pattern. Wendy didn't slow down, but sped up.

In the back seat, Gompers and his sheep friend were bleating. Mabel turned backward to look past them and out the rear window. "Go, go, go!" she said. "It's still coming!"

"Seatbelt, Dip!" Wendy yelled.

"Oh, yeah. Thank you, Wendy," Dipper said from somewhere in his private daze. "Sweet of you."

"Yeah, well, hang on, this is gonna be rough!"

The Dart bucketed along. Then they reached the paved road and screeched in a tight turn. The engine roared. Dipper said mildly, "I think you're speeding."

"Damn straight," Wendy said. "Eighty. I think that's about six times as fast as a killbilly can run!"

They didn't slow until they had gone four miles, and then Wendy asked, "Everybody all right?"

"I think so," Dipper muttered, starting to emerge from his mental fog. "My chest hurts. Bruised, I think."

"You got a black eye, too," Mabel said. "Wendy, how're you?"

"I'm a little scratched up, but mainly mad. That was my favorite axe!"

"I got part of it," Dipper said, holding up the head.

"Yeah, thanks," Wendy said. "I can carve a new handle. Shoot, I had my car all beautiful. Now I gotta replace the windshield, and I think there's about three dents I'll have to take out of the side door and the hood!"

"I'm sorry I slammed into the door," Dipper said.

Wendy's voice took on an edge of concern: "Dude, are you OK?"

"Been better," he admitted.

Mabel had been looking backward again. "The important thing," she said, "the _really_ important thing—is that Gompers and his girlfriend are fine."


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5: Damages**

 **(December 27, 2015)**

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Mabel asked me what the veterinarian's name was. Before I could answer, Wendy said, "Doc Setter's the one you want. He does farm animals. The other vet in town's a lady and does cats and dogs."_

 _She drove us to Doctor Setter's house, which is also his clinic. I remembered him from that summer when Grunkle Stan made me play baseball in the Little Guys League and Geetaur, son of Krobaur, and a Manotaur to boot, badly hurt his leg and the doc took care of it. "It's Sunday," I reminded them. "He probably doesn't have office hours."_

 _"It's an emergency!" Mabel insisted._

 _On the way to Setter's place, I became aware that in addition to dents and broken glass, Wendy's car had another problem. It smelled strongly of goat and, I guess, of sheep. Probably. I couldn't tell if it was one stink or a premium blend of two._

 _Anyway, we pulled into the drive and Mabel jumped out and ran and pounded on the front door. Dr. Setter came out, looking surprised, and when he saw me, he grinned. "Dipper Pines! Still playing baseball?"_

 _"No, sir," I said. "I'm on the varsity track team now."_

 _"Talk later, treat first!" Mabel said, leading him to the car. "Here's the patient."_

 _The vet peered through the car window. "Which one?"_

 _"The sheep!" Mabel said. "Can't you see she's in a delicate condition?"_

 _"That's a pygmy bighorn!" Doc Setter said. "I've never seen one up close. They're rare."_

 _"And she's had a terrible shock and I think she's gonna be a mommy!" Mabel said._

 _The doctor chuckled. "All right, all right, how could I not help in an emergency? Pull the car down in front of the barn, Wendy, and we'll get the goat and the sheep into a couple of stalls so I can have a look. How's your aunt Sallie?"_

 _"Still goin' strong," Wendy said._

 _"Good. Looks like you had an accident."_

 _"Yeah, no serious damage, but it kinda messed up the green machine."_

 _As Wendy drove the car slowly down to the barn that was also Doctor Setter's animal hospital, I walked along beside the vet. "Uh—how much will this cost, sir? Mabel and I have some money, but if we need to—"_

 _"Won't know until I have a look," he said. "But unless there's more wrong than meets the eye, I'll cap it at fifty dollars."_

 _I let out a sigh. I could afford that without dipping into my savings. Mabel opened the barn door. "I gotta stay!" she said. "Is it OK if I stay?"_

 _"Why—sure," the vet said. "See if you can persuade them to go into that first stall there over on the left."_

 _"Gompers will go if we can get the sheep in," Mabel said. "He's in love with her."_

 _"Oh, I see. Well—she looks like she might weigh in at about fifty pounds or so. Let me see if I can handle her." He rolled up his sleeves, picked the sheep up—she writhed and went "Mehhh," but Mabel walked alongside with her hand on the sheep's leg and they got her into the barn._

 _"How long will the exam take, Doc?" Wendy asked._

 _"Oh, forty-five minutes, an hour, for a thorough going over, check for parasites, maybe an ultrasound just to see if the little lady is expecting."_

 _"OK, I'm gonna drive over to Steve Wheeler's and see if he can find some parts for me. Mabes, give me a call when you get finished."_

 _Mabel gave her a thumbs-up._

 _"Steve Wheeler?" I asked._

 _"Yeah, he runs a garage. I know he'll be in this afternoon, 'cause he has an emergency tow service and he gives his assistant Sunday afternoons, Wednesdays, and Fridays off and caches the calls himself. Unless he's out with the wrecker."_

 _He wasn't. The wrecker stood in the lot. Steve Wheeler's Auto Parts and Service was on the edge of town, and when Wendy pulled in the bay, he came out of a little office to see what was up. I recognized him—he'd been one of the guys who was a re-enactor at the Pioneer Day every year. Grunkle Stan once told me "Steve's a good mechanic and a bad pain in the tuchus." I don't know what that was about._

 _"Oh, man," he said, wiping his hands on a pink, already-greasy rag. "Wendy, what did you run into? Deer?"_

 _"A killbilly, and don't call me 'dear' in front of my boyfriend," she said, but she was grinning._

 _He chuckled. "Thought you might've hit some ice and crashed. OK, let's see what we got here. Windshield, I'll have to look on the computer to see if there's one anywhere about. If we're lucky, there's one close, if not, might take a week. Hmm. Dent in the hood, not real bad, I can pop that out. What hit the door here?"_

 _"That would be me," I said. "The killbilly threw me."_

 _He raised an eyebrow at that. "Huh! Surprised you don't have a dent in yourself." He squinted at me. "Stan Pines's grandson, aren't you?"_

 _"Grand-nephew," I told him._

 _"Oh, yeah, that's right. Seen you around. Huh. Really crunked in here. OK, you don't want this filled with Bondo, so let's see if we can pop it out, sand it down a little, and make it look not too shabby. You want to help with the work, Wendy?"_

 _"Love to," she said._

 _"Let's go to my office and see what we can do."_

 _Everything was of concrete-block construction, painted that apple-green you see in old schools, and it all smelled like tires and used motor oil. The calendar on the wall had a big-busted girl in a Santa Claus hat and a red bikini trimmed with white fur lounging on the hood of a Caddy. On his desk, Mr. Wheeler had the dirtiest computer I've ever seen. I mean as in having layers of goop on it, not what he was looking at on the web._

 _With two fingers, he tap-tapped on the keyboard for a few minutes and then said, "Here's what we got. Not so bad. Two windshields close enough that I could get either one in by Tuesday noon. One's tinted, shaded green, would go good with your car, that forest green you got. Other one's plain, like the one you have. First one's two hundred fifty, second one is one sixty-five. Got a preference?"_

 _Wendy sighed. "I guess the plain one."_

 _"No," I said. "Get her the tinted one. I'll make up the difference."_

 _"Dip!"_

 _"It was sort of my fault," I said. "And I have the money."_

 _"Mm, mm, now that is true love," Mr. Wheeler said, tapping on the keyboard again. "Dents, well, if I can pop 'em out and don't have to do too much re-painting . . . hood's easy, say twenty-five. Door, that's a little trickier, I'll have to make sure nothing inside's messed up, make sure locks and window and all still work right. And I'll bet you a dollar I'll have to buff and then paint the whole door, so sixty for that, eighty-five total. That's a hundred and ten, plus the two-fifty for the windshield, forty to install, we're looking at four hundred, ballpark. I think I can get a little bit of a deal on the windshield, waiting for them to email me back, and I went high on the door estimate, so four hundred's probably high, but just so's you won't be surprised, I'll give you that as an estimate. You come in and help, I'll knock off fifteen bucks for every hour you work on her."_

 _"Deal," Wendy said. "I gotta have my wheels."_

 _"OK, I've ordered the windshield," Mr. Wheeler said. "I'm thinking you can probably bring it in Tuesday about one. We should have it fixed up by late Wednesday. I'll give you a call when the windshield comes in."_

 _"Call me on my cell phone or at the Mystery Shack," Wendy said. "I'm caretaking there until Soos and his family get back from Mexico. You have the number?"_

 _"Oh, I got Stan Pines's number, all right," Mr. Wheeler said with a grin, writing himself a note. "Call Wendy at Mystery Shack. You got it."_

 _We got in the car and started back toward the vet's. It might have been my imagination, but I thought the cracks in the glass were growing longer. "I'm sorry," I told Wendy. "Won't insurance pay for at least some of this?"_

 _"Don't think so," Wendy said. "You want to explain to an insurance adjuster that a killbilly smacked my car?"_

 _She had a point there. I didn't want to explain that to anybody._

* * *

Wendy drove slowly because of the fragile windshield. Before they reached the vet's office again, Dipper's phone rang—Mabel's ring tone—and he answered it. "Hi, Sis. We're on our way."

"Not the vet's. Meet us at the Shack," Mabel said, sounding happy.

"Us?"

"Teek's picked us up. You think we can rig up a stall for Gompers and Lady Godelpus in the storage shed?"

Dipper said, "I'm not sure if—wait, what? Lady what?"

"The name just came to me!" Mabel said. "Lady Godelpus! 'Cause the vet said, 'God help us, she's going to have a geep!' The little baby geep already has a heartbeat, and Dr. Setter thinks it has a great chance of making it. He even wants to attend the delivery!"

"Well," Dipper said, "I suppose we can call and ask Soos about that."

"What's she asking?" Wendy said.

"Tell you in a minute. OK, we'll meet you there."

When he hung up, he explained Mabel's plan. "Oh, man, that shed's no place for them!" Wendy said. "No heat, and the sheep will get skittish all shut up. How about this: I'll call my aunt Sallie. She's got plenty of room on the farm, and the barn's heated, so it would be better for them. And she's kept goats before, and she's got a couple of domestic ewes to keep Godelpus company, so Sallie will know what to feed 'em and everything."

The pavement was running with water as the snow melted in the warmth of the afternoon. Rivulets poured down the driveway. "Gets cold tonight, we'll have to put some melting compound out tomorrow morning," Wendy observed. She parked in the Shack lot.

Wendy left the back windows cracked open an inch so the goat reek would have a chance to thin out—"I'll bring out some cleaner and if you'll help me, we'll do the upholstery in the back," she said, and of course Dipper agreed.

As Wendy went inside, he opened both back doors wide, and when she returned with towels and a spray bottle, they sprayed and scrubbed the back seat until it smelled like pine, not Gompers. "Maybe that'll do," Wendy said, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. "I'll keep the front windows cracked open, too, to let that smell thin out. Remind me to roll them all up before night, though. Chance of snow again."

"Are we, uh, gonna spend the night?" Dipper asked.

She casually didn't look at him. "Eh, you want, I can drive you back to McGucket's."

"I'd rather not have you risk it with the cracked windshield," he said. "By the way, do you have a tarp in case it does snow? If water got in the cracks and froze—"

"Good thinking, man," Wendy said. She went inside and found a big sheet of rubberized canvas, and they used bungee cords to lash it to the roof and hood. "That should do it."

They found Mabel and Teek in the storage shed—which was cold and beginning to have a strong goaty aroma, too. Wendy asked if her aunt Sallie's farm would do as a possible goat refuge, and Mabel said, "Oh, that'd be so great! Will you ask her?"

Wendy called, Sallie said yes and told Wendy she'd be down in an hour with her truck and an animal trailer for Gompers and Godelpus—she laughed at the name.

Meanwhile, Teek pitched in and cooked his specialty burgers for everyone. After the morning's adventure with no sustaining gorp, both Wendy and Dipper ate a whole burger each instead of splitting one, as they usually did. Wonder of wonders, Mabel held herself to just one as well. As usual, Teek munched his own burger without seeming to notice, because he looked only at Mabel, smiling at what he saw as he watched her eat. He found it charming. There's no accounting for tastes when a guy's more than halfway in love.

In less than an hour, Aunt Sallie pulled into the parking lot. She went back to look at the sheep and goat, shook her head and said, "Land sakes, I've heard of this happening, never saw it. Never saw one of them little pygbigs, either, come to that." She came inside for a cup of coffee, commented on how grown-up Dipper and Mabel were looking, and solemnly promised that Mabel could come visit Gompers and his missus as much and as often as she wanted.

"I can't drive her, though," Wendy said. "Not until my car gets fixed up."

"Saw the tarp," Aunt Sallie said. "What hit you?"

"How do you know it wasn't the other way around, that I didn't hit something?" Wendy asked.

Sallie chuckled. "'Cause I know your driving, Wendy. No way was whatever happened your fault."

Wendy smiled. "Well—you ever hear of killbillies?"

Sallie almost spat her coffee out. She gulped it down. "Them blame things still around? Lord, when I was a girl, there was places in the valley a body couldn't go! 'Course I heard of 'em. They'll break your bones and drink your blood! One take out after you?"

"Wendy fought it off," Dipper said.

"I wasn't doing so hot, though," Wendy confessed. "But Dipper pitched in and then Mabel gave it the _coup de grâce_ with her grappling hook. Spang! Right in the back of the head."

"Kill it?" Aunt Sallie asked.

"No," Mabel said. "It came to and got up again and tried to eat the car."

"Yeah, they'll do that," Aunt Sallie agreed. "Well, if you will help me load the critters, I'll take them up to the farm. I suppose Godelpus will calm down when she gets in among my ewes. But I'm gonna make sure that Gompers never gets a chance at any of mine! A goat/sheep hybrid just ain't natural, but if this one lives, I suppose it's the good Lord's will."

They saw her and the sheep and goat couple off, Mabel looking a little droopy as the truck and trailer clattered down the soggy driveway. "I'm gonna miss both of them so much," she said.

Wendy said, "Cheer up. They'll be out of the valley, safe and in a good warm place with plenty of food and plenty of company. And I'll bet you anything Aunt Sallie can be talked into sending you photos of them every week."

"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "Out of the valley? Is that important?"

"Could be," Wendy said. "Dad's told me that once a killbilly gets on the scent of a sheep, it usually keeps coming until one or the other is dead. They supposedly never leave the valley, though. Maybe that weirdness barrier that Ford talks about sometimes. Anyway, we probably don't have to worry about the killbilly, 'cause I don't think it could track us all the way to the Shack with us bringing its prey here in my car and all, but there's a slim chance."

"Then I'm not leaving you here by yourself!" Dipper said.

"I'll be safe in here," Wendy assured him. "That weird unicorn mojo still works, right?"

"Against paranormal threats. I don't know how effective it might be against killbillies, though," Dipper said.

Mabel pointed out less than helpfully, "You and Wendy aren't supposed to be alone together."

"This is a matter of keeping her safe, though," Dipper told her.

"Let me finish," Mabel replied. "That's exactly why Teek and me will stay over with you!"

Teek looked stunned—but happily stunned. "Good idea!" he said.

Mabel punched the air. "All ideas are good ideas!"

 _Oh, boy_ , Dipper thought.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6: Pulling an Overnighter**

 **(December 27-28, 2015)**

* * *

At four that afternoon, Wendy got a pleasant surprise: Steve Wheeler called from the garage. "Bottom line," he said, "if you got a way to get to Kennewick, you can pick up a windshield there, same tint you wanted, good condition, for two hundred bucks. Guy has one he can't use. I'd send somebody, but I'm short-handed during the holidays."

"I'll see what I can do," Wendy said.

"Don't drive the Dart," Steve warned. "That windshield's gonna crack out on you, that much mileage."

"No, I'll figure something. Where do I go?"

She wrote down the name of the small garage and Steve said he'd call the guy back and tell him to hold the windshield. Wendy told the others what she'd learned. "Wish dad hadn't sold his Jeep," she muttered. "Or that Soos had left me the keys to the pickup."

"We can use my car," Teek volunteered.

"Dude, that would be awesome," Wendy said, grinning. "I'll pay for gas."

"Uh, how far is it?" Dipper asked. He'd heard of Kennewick, but he didn't know Oregon geography that well.

"It's up north," Wendy told him. "Like a four-hour trip, one way. It'll be an all-day expedition."

"Teek and I will go!" Mabel volunteered. "We'll just need the money."

Dipper emptied his wallet. Two hundred and thirty dollars. "Dude," Wendy said, "you don't need to do that. I can go to the bank tomorrow—"

"Pay me back," Dipper said.

Wendy gave them her ready cash—not that much, about sixty dollars—for emergencies. She copied the address and phone number of the small business—Northwheels Parts and Service—for Teek. "You guys be careful," she warned. "If it snows again, the roads may get bad."

"I'll let my folks know."

Meanwhile, Mabel—the best diplomat, because Stan had taught her to lie like a trooper—called McGucket and arranged for them to be away. She even mentioned guarding against a killbilly.

McGucket said, "Them rascals? You know one time when I wasn't in my right mind, those hootie-owls kidnapped me for a week. I think they wanted to suckify my blood, but I happened to have my banjo around, and I found out that bluegrass music pacifimies them. I made my getaway playing 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown.' They woulda caught me, but they got all tanglified up breakin' it down."

"So . . . is it OK if we stay over, in case this one followed us?"

"Shoot, I reckon so. Y'all sort of chaperone each other, now, y'hear?"

"Got it!" Mabel said. "Any suggestions on how to handle a killbilly?"

"Don't do it," McGucket advised. "You touch one, your hands gonna have a stank on them for a week! But distractify them. You got any Stanley Brothers records? Or Flatt & Scruggs? Um, Old Crow Medicine Show? You do, you play that bluegrass music and they won't hurt you. Oh, or get y'selves to a convenience store. Y'er always safe from killbillies in a convenience store. They can't get at you, and they get discouraged and eventual-like they leave you alone."

"Why a convenience store?" Mabel asked.

"Dunno, but they'd as soon go near one as suck a moose's left hind foot."

"OK," Mabel said. "Thanks for the tip."

She hung up and told the others, "It's fixed, but he says to repel them with bluegrass banjo music or else hide in a convenience store."

"Why is that?" Teek asked.

"I know from the Journals," Dipper said. "They can't enter a convenience store, ever. 'No shirt, no shoes, no service.'"

"Well," Wendy said. "Now if Teek can arrange it with his folks—"

"All set," he said. "They're not home. They'll be off in Idaho visiting relatives until the weekend. I begged off because I had a bad cold when they left." He coughed theatrically.

Mabel punched his shoulder. "Teek, you prevaricator! I've taught you some life skills."

He grinned. "They'll call to check on me, but I'll drive back to the house and set the landline to forward calls to my cell phone, so they'll never know."

"Hold the fort until we get back!" Mabel said, bouncing up from the sofa. "If the killbilly shows up, kill it with fire!"

"Maybe you could swing by the McGuckets' and pick up my guitar," Dipper said

"Sure! Let's go, Teek!"

"You guys be careful, and hurry back here," Wendy warned. She and Dipper walked them out to Teek's silver Fusion and saw them off.

"You think the killbilly can really follow us here?" Dipper asked.

"Dunno," Wendy said. "They can run, like, fifteen miles an hour for short stretches, but they can't keep at it long. Dad says when they track, they're like all over the place, winding as they go, kinda crisscrossing the trail. They have a keen sense of smell, but it's hard for them to concentrate on a spoor 'cause they stink so bad themselves. I'd say it couldn't get to us before after full dark, assuming it's trying to follow us."

Dipper glanced at the window. The sun would set in a few minutes—then full dark wouldn't be far off. "I shouldn't have told her to get the guitar," he said.

"Sheep didn't go to the McGuckets, Dip," Wendy said. "We brought it here. We'll listen for the car and go out and escort them back in. Meanwhile, let's see if we can download any bluegrass music. You know any good banjo pickers?"

"Not my kind of music," Dipper said. "But the internet knows everything."

That was true. After ten minutes online, they had a playlist: "Rocky Top," "Dueling Banjos," a whole album by the Smileys, "Broadway Bluegrass" ("Defying Gravity" on twin banjos sounded surprisingly peppy), "Rye Whiskey," "The Wreck of the Old '97," and a dozen others.

By then the sun had set. "Dude," Wendy said, "let's protect the Shack. I've loaded these on a USB stick, so let's fire up the PA and start a hootin-owl-nanny."

Dipper chuckled. "I think that's 'hootenanny,'" he said.

"Not the way McGucket says it!"

The control box was in the office. They hooked up Wendy's laptop to the panel and plugged it in to the power source so the battery wouldn't run down. Then the speaker atop the Shack started playing the Smileys, playing and singing "Tonight," from _West Side Story._ Played at double tempo and sung with hill-folk Tennessee accents, it was a whole different song.

"I'm not sleeping in the attic," Dipper said. "Not if we play that all night." The speaker was on the roof right above the triangular window.

"We'll rough it," Wendy said. "Won't be too loud in the living room. You and Mabes left your sleeping bags here last summer, right?"

"In the attic storeroom," Dipper said. "You have yours?"

"Trunk of the Dart. I'll bring it in when Teek and Mabel get back. Teek can sack out on the sofa, we'll do all right."

Dipper asked, "How long until they get back?"

"Twenty minutes or so," Wendy said. "Gee, we have nothing to do."

"We could start dinner."

Wendy pulled him closer and kissed him.

 _We could start something else. Missed this, Dip!_

— _Um—mental make-out session?_

 _You read my mind, dude!_

* * *

Full dusk had fallen when Teek parked as close to the Shack as he could. Dipper and Wendy sauntered out to help them and make sure they got in unmolested by any lurking killbilly.

Dipper carried his guitar, and Wendy carried another kind of axe. "Anything happen while we were gone?" Mabel asked.

"No killbillies," Wendy told her.

"Mm-hmm," Mabel said knowingly. "Well, you two seem to have relaxed a little." Somehow she could always tell.

"That music's supposed to keep it away?" Teek asked.

"That's the plan," Dipper told him. "Let's get inside."

Though in the off season Soos never bothered to turn on the outside lights, Wendy switched them all on—parking-lot lights, the sign lights atop the Shack, three porch lights. The music, set on a repeat cycle, played on and on. Mabel complained that it got on her nerves.

"If nothing happens tonight," Wendy said, "I think we can assume nothing's gonna happen. I'll turn it off tomorrow."

She and Teek cooked up a big pot of stew. Following Wendy's spoken directions, Dipper mixed up a batter for corn bread—"Buttermilk?" he asked.

"Yeah, and make sure you get just enough oil in the batter," Wendy said. "And an egg. You don't want it to be too crumbly."

Meanwhile Mabel chopped cabbage for coleslaw, wielding a sharp knife and yelling, "Die, cabbage, die!"

Though it took a while to cook, by seven the meal was ready—piping hot corn muffins, not sweet ("My Aunt Sallie learned to leave the sugar out when she visited South Carolina once"), savory beef stew with carrots, onions, and potatoes, and the crunchy coleslaw.

Teek asked at one point, "What's the matter, Mabel? Are you sick?"

"Not sick," she said. "Seven pounds too heavy. I'm easing up on the intake."

"Oh," Teek said. If he'd noticed the extra poundage, he hadn't mentioned it.

After the meal and the clean-up, the four teens made sure all the doors were locked, then they gathered in the parlor for a movie— _The Night the Creepy Yuck Attacked the Campus Full of Curvy Coeds,_ technically R-rated for some skin and gore. For a change it didn't star aging college jock Chadley and his girlfriend Trixandra, but it was released by the same studio, Good Enough Pictures.

"How much did you pay for the DVD?" Mabel asked Wendy.

"Ninety-nine cents. It was in the bargain bin at Under a Buck," Wendy said.

"You were over-charged," Mabel said.

Unlike the Chadley films, this one was in color—they thought, everything was fuzzy and faded—and it featured some of the production company's B-list actors, who would have been D-list anywhere else.

Teek and Mabel settled down side by side on the sofa, snuggled close together. Dipper and Wendy sat on the floor, draped in a queen-sized red blanket. "Don't get up to anything under there," Mabel warned.

"We're just keeping each other warm," Wendy said.

— _Nothing like a hot girl to keep warm,_ Dipper thought to her.

 _Smooth, dude. Seriously, you're better at romantic banter than that._

— _I'll try harder._

The movie was just as horrendously laughable as a Chadley and Trixandra epic. It was set mostly in a girl's dormitory at the College of Education University. "Hey," Mabel said, "that's not another dorm room. That's the same one as Rolinda's and Vikita's, with the beds on different walls!"

"Dorm rooms are all the same," Teek said.

"Yeah, but the common room is also the same as the Dean's Office," Mabel pointed out. "Even the same pictures on the walls!"

The first ten minutes of the movie was mainly co-eds getting ready for bed, removing a good part of their clothes, and then brushing their teeth while wearing bras and panties.

"Boo! Where are the hot _guys_?" Mabel asked.

They were frat boys, Benford, Marcus, and Yelbert—who by the way seemed to be the only members of Iota Shma Kyuon, and whose frat house was identical to the girls' dorm. For college kids, they looked a little old, too—Yelbert, the youngest, had to be at least thirty-five. The dialogue was, um, low-level.

* * *

Benford: "Gee, guys, I was just thinking that the plasmoid that Professor Kidman gave Brulincia to watch over the weekend might be dangerous."

Yelbert: "Come on, Benford! How could a chemical substance that feeds on brain waves be dangerous?"

Marcus: "No, he has made a vapid point. I think we should go to the dorm and check on the girls to make sure they are in no danger."

All: "Let's go!"

* * *

"Wait," Mabel said. "Did that guy say 'vapid point?'"

"I think he meant 'valid point,'" Teek told her.

"Oh. It was a joke?"

"Nah," Wendy said. "This company's actors can't read good."

The plasmoid looked like oatmeal made with too much water and doctored with both blue and green food coloring, probably because that's what it was. Brulincia, who appeared to be wearing a long, cheap blond wig (probably because the actress was) had been instructed by her Advanced Chemistry and Science teacher to "Keep this tightly covered and in a dark place!"

"Oh, gee, Professor," she had said to Professor Wick Kidman, "that is such a great responsibility! Why can't you keep it nice and dark inside of your chemicals safe?"

"Because of reasons!" he had said. " _Scientific_ reasons!"

"I understand."

Unfortunately, Brulincia was a bit of a ditz and thoughtlessly set the half-liter beaker of the oatmeal-like plasmoid beneath the reading lamp on her desk and completely forgot to cover it. While the girls were taking a group shower as they prepared for bed, the camera left their blurred forms ("Nobody wears a body stocking into the shower!" Mabel complained), and the picture focused on the beaker, which began to bubble. The oatmeal must have contained dishwashing detergent, because purple-green foam started to ooze out of the container.

"Just pull the not-invisible plastic tube out of it!" Wendy called to the TV. "That'll stop the bubbling!"

"They can't," Dipper said. "It's taped to the side!"

Oddly, when Brucilinda—that's what her roommate called Brulincia in that one scene, anyway—came back and got into bed, she utterly failed to notice that the beaker had not only somehow moved from her desk to her bedside table, but had completely overflowed and covered the entire surface in glop.

In darkness created by a blue filter over the camera lens, the goop crept up the pillow—an effect cleverly created by using what was obviously a white trash bag instead of a pillowcase and letting a puddle of the stuff drip off it onto the floor, then reversing the film—and without an intervening moment, completely covered Brulincia's face. She flailed her arms and then fell motionless.

"One down," Teek said. "Six to go."

The plot became sort of hard to follow. It seemed that once the oatmeal had covered a character's face, the character became a mindless carrier of the mind-controlling plasmoid. Or something. In a later scene when they forgot the blue filter, Brulincia got out of her bed, blank-eyed, climbed into bed with her roommate Malintha (who this time said, "Why, Brucilina! What has got into you?", getting the name wrong again).

In response, Brulincia kissed her on the mouth. For about twenty seconds.

Malintha gasped. "Oh! That turns me on, though I do not like girls that way because I am not a Thespian!"

"Got that one right," Wendy snarked.

Malintha embraced Brulincia. "That plasmoid! It somehow got out of your mouth and into mine! I feel my mind going! Desire is strong in me. Give me some more!"

And they locked lips again.

Mabel, Teek, Dipper, and Wendy laughed through the whole movie. It would have had to be four times as good as it was to even be horrible.

They were feeling pretty good, until, from outside the Shack, over the banjo rendition of "The Crow" by Steve Martin (yes, _that_ Steve Martin), they heard some disturbing sounds: Something outside was smashing something else.

And then—the hamboning began.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7: Metalocalypse**

 **(December 28, 2015)**

* * *

The pigs were Mabel's first concern, but they had come around and huddled on the Museum porch, directly under the speaker. Wendy cranked up the volume on the Osborne Brothers' rendition of "Rocky Top" until the windows vibrated. Mabel yanked open the door, and Waddles and Widdles rushed through, ran to the gift shop, and lay trembling on the floor, while Mabel and Teek made sure the door was not only locked and bolted, but braced with a chair.

From the gift shop, Dipper had climbed up to the roof, the only vantage point from which he could see the tool shed, which Soos had built tucked back into a little bay of the woods thirty yards from the Shack. Lying on his stomach on the cold shingles, he used a pair of Ford's night-vision goggles, in which everything showed up in shades of black and green, and he could make out the squat, long-armed killbilly not far from the shed, running in circles and probably gibbering—the loud music only a few feet from his head made it hard to tell—as it now and then dropped to all fours and snuffled around on the ground, then stood up and hamboned in a frustrated way, evidently reacting to the music.

Dipper followed its movements, which led him to climb over the roof peak and around the chimney, but it was just tracking, working its way all the way around the Shack. Dipper returned to the gift-shop roof and to the trap door, still open. He descended the ladder. "The pigs safe?" he asked as he climbed dow.

"Yes!" Mabel said. "They're hiding behind the counter. Waddles led the way! He went to the porch and pressed against the door, ready to keep that hamboner from boning their ham! He—"

"At least they're OK," Dipper said. "Listen, everybody—the killbilly tore the toolshed doors right off the hinges. I could see them on the ground. I think it's pulled out and scattered some tools and cans of paint, but it's trying to pick up the sheep scent, I'm pretty sure." He described how it was circling and snuffling.

"Sounds right," Wendy said. "That's how Dad described them when they're on a trail, or trying to pick one up."

"Is the music helping?" Teek asked.

"Think so. Every few seconds it jumps up and hambones like a maniac, and I think it's, like, bellowing and snarling. Rhythmically. The music seems to force it off its tracking. Can it go louder?"

"Topped out at ten, dude," Wendy said. On their improvised soundtrack, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" started, the chase music that helped Bonnie and Clyde evade the law, at least in the movie. In real life, it was written fifteen years after Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down. They missed escaping with their lives by the lack of one banjo tune. Sad when you think about it.

"I'll go download another bunch of songs," Dipper said. "Maybe the rotation is wearing thin on him."

"Everybody else, guard a door!" Wendy ordered. "I'll take the gift shop and front door, 'cause I can see 'em both from the hall, and they're so far from the music. Mabel, stand in the Museum and watch that door. Teek, you take the back door. If any of the doors get attacked, yell for help and gather in the hall! Teek, here, you take this." She tossed him one of Stan's baseball bats. "Mabel, here's Ford's crossbow. Remember which end the arrow comes out of! I got my choppin' axe. Go, go, go!"

She brandished the axe she normally used only for cutting wood, not her defensive one, which was still minus a handle. The chopping axe was heavier, anyway, and nearly as sharp.

At the computer in the office, Dipper scanned through a list of top 100 bluegrass songs and downloaded all that looked unfamiliar. He'd put twenty-odd .mp3s on a memory stick, when something caught his eye—a history of bluegrass.

One sentence jumped out: "A few bands have developed the grassmetal sound, with bluegrass rhythms and instruments backing rocked-out metal tunes."

He found and downloaded one of them, an adaptation and cover of "Swamp Leech." Then he yanked out the USB memory stick, waited until there was a break between numbers, and replaced the one in Wendy's laptop with the new one. "Wabash Cannonball" began to blare over the speakers, and he hurried downstairs. "Think we can make a run for the car?" he asked.

"Don't want to risk it," Wendy said. "That thing's fast in short bursts!"

"Well, we can't just wait here. I've put on some new tunes, but they might wear off after a while."

Wendy shook her head. "Fight it out where we are, Dip. Where would we go? The McGuckets'? Don't want to lead this thing to them, man!"

"I might have something, but I don't have what we need." Dipper told her his idea. "Guess it was dumb," he muttered.

Wendy nodded, her expression tense. "Hm. Is that all you need, man?"

"Well, yeah. And even then it might not—"

"Listen—go to the storeroom. Look under the table, up against the wall. That long case, you'll recognize it. The rest of the stuff is in the attic closet."

Dipper ran. He dropped to his stomach and looked in the dusty space beneath the storeroom table, and he did recognize the case. He dragged it out, dust-covered and obviously untouched. Then he grabbed the keys from where they hung under the cash register and raced up to the attic. The attic storage closet at the top of the stairs, long but narrow and slant-roofed, had the usual clutter in it, including the rolled-up electron carpet. But he found Soos's keyboard and sound equipment and in two trips, he carried down what he needed.

"How'd this get here?" he panted, picking up the case.

"Soos took it up long time ago, but gave up on it. Best place to set up?"

"Back door," Dipper said. "Closest to the shed."

"Do it, man. I'll set up the keyboard."

"Right."

Only two tunes were left on the playlist before it would start to repeat when Dipper got everything set up. "I don't even know if this will work," he admitted.

"Better than nothing," Wendy said.

"One last thing to get from the lab. Hope it's charged!"

He got that, checked—it was fully charged—and the rest quickly gathered as he told them the plan. "Can you handle keyboard?" he asked Mabel.

"At least as good as Soos!"

"Oh, boy," Dipper groaned.

Teek went into the office. When the song before "Swamp Leech" ended, Dipper yelled, "Kill it!"

The speaker went silent, and Dipper kicked open the door and set two amps out on the porch. Then he tossed two balls of yarn out into the yard.

They were 100% wool. From sheep.

"Listen," he whispered. He stood on the porch, not a foot outside the door. Mabel stood inside, her fingers poised over the keyboard.

"We may get some feedback," she said softly.

"That can only improve things. I hear it!"

Snuffly sounds like a hound on a trail came from the cold darkness. The killbilly, spidery, came twisting and creeping over the ground, sniffing and snorting. In the faint light that spilled into the yard from the porch bulb, they saw it pounce on one of the yarn balls, shaking it and snarling. Then its coconut-sized head swiveled toward, and they saw its eyes reflecting a neon green. Howling, it loped toward them—

"Teek! Now!" Wendy yelled.

Instantly the grassmetal song began. The killbilly skidded to a stop fifteen yards away, rose to its hind legs and hamboned. About thirty seconds in, at a chord change, Dipper shredded on Soos's old electric guitar, which was not quite in tune, and Mabel began to pound out a heavy metal rhythm on the keyboard drum set.

Teek hurried in and yelled, "It's on repeat, so it'll start the playlist over again!"

"Grab your bat," Wendy yelled back at him over the incredible noise. "Go for the knees!"

"More volume!" Dipper yelled.

Mabel screamed back: "I'm giving her all she's got! She can't take any more!" For some reason she sounded faintly Scottish.

Frantically, Dipper wailed away, feeling as if his fingertips were about to bleed. The vibration shook the bones inside him. The amps danced on the porch. They screamed furious feedback into the night. For a thousand-yard radius, every living thing fled away from the Shack. A couple of hibernating bears in the mountains woke up.

The killbilly frantically hamboned, leaping as much as fifteen feet in the air, slapping itself mercilessly. Mabel pounded out a driving drum rhythm.

Together, Dipper and Mabel started to yell, "Head bang! Head bang! Head bang!"

And the killbilly obediently picked up two rocks, part of the path border, and started to head bang.

Dipper winced. Even over the deafening music, he could hear the dull thuds. At the climax of the music, as everything crescendoed, he struck a wild howling G chord.

The killbilly smashed both rocks on its head at the same time—and then collapsed.

"Got him!" Dipper said, getting out of the guitar strap and snatching the pistol-like device from his belt. He jumped off the porch and ran toward the twitching form of the stunned killbilly. Behind him, Mabel yelled, "Be careful, Dipper!"

He heard something on both sides of him—Wendy on one side, Mabel on the other, one with an axe, one with a grappling hook. Teek was at their heels, brandishing Grunkle Stan's Louisville Slugger.

The killbilly, groaning, started to push itself up—

Dipper fired, yelling, "Time freeze!"

And a translucent red force bubble formed around the killbilly, immobilizing it.

"Nailed him!" Mabel yelled.

"Yeah, but it'll wear off," Dipper said.

Temporarily, time had stopped for the killbilly, frozen in a semi-kneeling posture.

"What can we do with it?" Teek asked, coming up behind and breathing hard.

In unison, Wendy and Mabel said, "Bottomless Pit!" Then Mabel added, "Jinx! You owe me a Pitt's!"

"It won't hold him," Dipper pointed out. "Living things fall for twenty-two minutes, then pop out again. By then he'll be back in normal time."

"We could put it in the trunk of my car and haul it away," Teek suggested.

"I don't know exactly how long the time freeze will hold," Dipper said. "Thirty minutes, tops. If it came to back there, it would claw its way into the back seat in about half a minute."

"Dude," Wendy said. "Bunker."

"The cryotube?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah."

Dipper bit his lip. "I don't know. It's not that close."

"Hit him again!" Mabel suggested.

"You can't put a time-freeze bubble around a time-freeze bubble," Dipper said.

"Have the gun ready, and if he comes out of it, _then_ hit him again," Wendy said.

"I guess that'd work. If there's enough charge left."

They found out they could roll the time bubble. Touching it wasn't pleasant—it gave them a slight electric shock, even through gloves—but they could stand it, and they took turns.

Once off the Mystery Trail, they had the hardest time in the dark forest, where in places tree limbs stuck up out of the frozen-over snow cover. Two of them used flashlights while the other two rolled the bubble.

In the toughest parts of the woods, Wendy chopped a way through. When they had nearly reached the bunker, disguised under its metal tree, the time field popped just like a soap bubble, and the killbilly groggily said, "Grampuck!" Dipper hit him again at point-blank range. "Charge is used up," he said, seeing the red light on the pistol gleam. "Let's hurry!"

Wendy climbed the tree, smacked the limb-lever, and the concealed stairway rotated and appeared. They couldn't carry the time bubble down, so they rolled it. It rattled and bounded like a boulder chasing an archaeologist all the way to the bottom. Since their first visit there—it brought a little pang to Dipper to remember their encounter with the Shapeshifter and how afterward Wendy had said she wanted to be just friends—Dipper had returned twice with Ford, and he'd learned the secret of how to disarm the "crush room" without touching the arcane symbols.

They rolled the killbilly through and into the cryochamber. "Wow!" Teek, a newcomer, said, staring at one of the freeze tubes. "Is that _you_?"

"That's the Shapeshifter," Dipper said, not looking. The sight of his own frozen form caught in the act of screaming always gave him the willies. "Just disguised as me."

"Hey," Mabel said, "you should have seen it disguised as both of us at once, with a big crab thrown in, too. That was _adorable_!"

"To you, maybe. Scared the pee out of me," Dipper muttered. "There's an empty one. Mabel, you remember how to activate it?"

"I'm on it!" She ran to the control booth.

"Will it fit?" Teek asked as they rolled the time-freeze ball up to the open door of the cryochamber.

"I think so, barely," Dipper said.

With Wendy's help and a lot of grunting—more of discomfort than effort, because the electric throbbing in their hands started to hurt—they squeezed the time bubble inside, and then they retreated to the control room.

"Now?" Mabel asked, her palm poised over the _ON_ button.

"No," Dipper said. "I don't know what would happen with the time-freeze bubble jammed in there. We'll have to wait about fifteen, twenty minutes, until it pops."

They waited, uncomfortable and shivering. The bunker had no heating system—and in the cryochamber, what would even be the point? They were underdressed for the weather, too, all in long sleeves, but none had risked the time to get into heavy coats. "What time is it?" Dipper asked.

"Um—ten past midnight," Teek said, checking his phone.

"OK, in Hawaii, it's just a little past nine." He took out his own phone and tapped in Ford's number.

Which would have worked fine had there been any reception underground.

Thirteen minutes later the time bubble popped, and as the still-dazed Killbilly stirred and tried to get to its feet, Dipper said, "Now!"

Mabel hit the activation bubble, the tube whooshed with an otherworldly gas retrieved from the crashed flying saucer, near-absolute zero flooded the transparent chamber, and the killbilly, glistening with a coating of frost, crouched immobilized.

They went into the cryotube room briefly for a look. Up close, the thing was less human than spider-monkey, furry arms and legs, a tuft of hair on its head rising to a peak like a tattered mountaineer's hat, beady little eyes, flat nose, mouth invisible under its tangle of beard.

"Let's get out of here," Dipper said. He led them out, then re-activated the crusher room just in case. He even put it on "Escape Proof," which meant it would engage no matter which way one entered it. He doubted if the killbilly would be quick enough to touch the four crucial symbols, even if it could figure them out.

But outside, in the chilly air—the temperature had dropped down to the high twenties—Dipper called Ford again, and this time he got through. "Great-uncle Ford, something's happened," he said. He gave his report.

"Amazing," Ford said. "Tell me, is the ground frozen hard?"

"Uh, pretty hard, and under a cover of crusted snow," Dipper said.

"That would explain it. The killbilly can't dig for its normal winter diet of hibernating ground squirrels, skunks, and badgers. And anyway, they prefer sheep and if they get on the trail of one, they won't stop unless the chase is hopeless. And they don't know what 'hopeless' means—"

"We froze it," Dipper said, his own teeth chattering as they walked through the woods. "It's in a cryotube in the bunker. Will that hold?"

"Oh, certainly, I think," Ford said. "Would you give me a call next week after I get home again to remind me? From here, I'll do a remote check to make sure it's confined. Then when I return to Gravity Falls, I must upgrade the backup power for the bunker, just in case there's a main power failure. That will keep the beast frozen."

"I will. Sorry to interrupt your vacation."

"That's all right. Lorena and I are just back from a luau. Tomorrow we're going snorkeling!"

"Have fun," Dipper said. "And thanks. Bye!"

As they hit the Mystery Trail on the edge of the woods, they walked on, Mabel hugging Teek and Wendy hugging Dipper. "I think my nose is frozen," he said.

"Yeah, we should've layered up," Wendy said. "We'll get warm in the Shack."

The Shack, looking wonderful with all its lights ablaze, showed up. "Hey!" Mabel said. "It's snowing!"

It surely was. Big fat flakes spiraled down, gleaming in the electric lights' glow. They got inside, shivering. Waddles and Widdles, who must have sensed that the danger was past, wanted out, so Mabel let them return to their heated sty, which the killbilly had evidently ignored.

"Tomorrow," Dipper said, "We'll have to see if we can re-mount the toolshed doors."

"And we'll go get your windshield," Teek said.

"Only if the roads are clear," Wendy said firmly. "This may be a blizzard."

Inside, they switched off the bluegrass music and got ready for bed. "We all gonna stay in the parlor?" Mabel asked.

"I think that would be best," Wendy told her.

But as they got ready to turn in, Mabel discovered something. "This sleeping bag is big enough for two!"

Oh, they could have doubled up, Mabel and Wendy, Dipper and Teek. But Mabel had a better idea.

And though they really didn't _do_ anything—too tired—the teens did enjoy a somewhat uncomfortable (even with air mattresses, the floor was hard) but certainly a warm and snuggly night's sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8: Good Morning, Good Day, All Good**

 **(December 28, 2015)**

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _If there is anything nicer than waking up snuggled close to a warm, beautiful redhead with peppermint on her breath, I don't know what it is._

 _Wendy was already awake, and she kissed me. "Morning, dork!"_

" _Mm," I said. "I'm not awake yet. I must be still dreaming."_

" _Want me to pinch you?"_

" _No. Another kiss would be nice."_

 _She gave me one, and I ran my fingers through her shorter hair. "It's starting to grow out," she said, her cheek touching mine._

" _I love it any way you wear it," I told her. But she caught my inner thought: it would be so great if I could hang around in Gravity Falls and just watch it grow._

 _She laughed and sent me a thought:_ 'Bout as exciting as watching paint dry.

 _I whispered, "A billion times better, Wen."_

 _We nuzzled a little more, but she said, "Don't get too revved up. We can't get carried away. Besides, time for breakfast!"_

 _She gave me a final kiss, on the nose, then got up—the sleeping-bag zipper was on her side, and she'd already been up, because she was wearing her flannel shirt, jeans, and socks—and said, "Breakfast in ten minutes, Dip. Want to get dressed first?"_

 _I used the downstairs shower and changed back into yesterday's clothes. No help for that, I hadn't brought any fresh ones over from the McGuckets'. When I got to the dining room, Wendy was setting down a plate of pancakes and sausage links. "Where's Mabel?" I asked._

" _She and Teek are on their way to pick up that windshield."_

" _What time is it?" I looked over at the kitty-cat clock. "Ten AM? Wow, I haven't slept this late in years!"_

" _Yeah, Mabes and Teek were up at eight, so I got up and already had breakfast with them. You were sleeping so good I didn't want to wake you. Anyway, after the three of us ate, we checked online to see how the roads are. Only about an inch of new snow last night, and it was so cold that most of it blew off the pavement. Anyway, they took off before nine. They'll probably get back between four and five."_

" _Aw. I was going to pay for the windshield."_

" _It's OK, Dipper, really. The place will take a check, 'cause Steve arranged with them."_

 _I took a bite of the pancakes. Fluffy and sweet and—"Blueberry?"_

" _Close. Huckleberries. They're sort of wild blueberries. These are frozen, though. Picked 'em myself."_

" _They're good!" I could imagine Mabel plowing through a stack of these—I'd never had huckleberry pancakes before, but they rose right up to my top ten breakfast faves._

" _Glad you like them." Wendy brought me a cup of coffee and poured another for herself—her second one, I guessed. Two were her normal limit. She sat smiling and watching me eat._

 _I love her smile._

 _When I finished—and I told her the pancakes were the best I'd ever tasted—she and I cleaned up our dishes and cups, and then I told her I needed to go check on Ford's machine. She tagged along with me down to the lab._

 _It was fine—the weirdness line was still low, under 880, nowhere near the red line—and I texted Great-Uncle Ford to tell him that. Just as I finished, my phone rang. It was Mom and Dad, and Wendy sat in a chair opposite me and zipped her lip._

" _Hi," I said. Mom, face-timing._

" _Just checking in," she said. "How are you doing?"_

" _Oh, everything's fine," I said. "I'm in Great-Uncle Ford's lab right now, like he asked, checking on his machine."_

" _Is it all right?"_

" _Yes, I just have to record some readings for him."_

" _Be careful not to break anything."_

 _I laughed. "Mom, I barely need to touch it! It's OK."_

" _Can I speak to Mabel?"_

" _She got up early and went out shopping," I told her. "Have you tried her phone?"_

" _It goes to voice mail."_

" _She probably let it run out of charge. She does that," I reminded Mom. "I'll have her call you this afternoon, OK? She should be back between four and five."_

" _All right. You have a letter from that agent in New York. It looks like it might be a check."_

" _It'll keep," I said. "Thanks for telling me. You and Dad OK?"_

" _Yes. Alex is back at work until Thursday this week, though. The house seems empty."_

" _Mabel and I will fill it up when we get back home, and you'll wish we were gone again."_

" _Oh, I almost forgot—little Billy Sheaffer came by and dropped off a couple of small late Christmas presents for you and Mabel."_

" _I'll get something for him here in Gravity Falls. We'll call it a New Year's present."_

" _You behave yourselves," Mom said, but she was smiling._

" _We will. Love you, Mom."_

" _Love you too, Dipper. Don't forget to have Mabel call me."_

 _I promised I wouldn't and hung up. Wendy let out a breath. "I guess we'd be in deep doodoo if she knew we slept in the same sleeping bag last night."_

" _I don't want to think about it."_

 _She grinned. "Want to help me do the routine chores and check-ups around the Shack? That'll take about half an hour. And then—we'll see what other mischief we can get into."_

 _That sounded good to me._

* * *

They didn't break their promise, but they did another little mental make-out session. And then they just chilled for a while before having a light lunch.

The weather warmed up, if you could call it that, to about forty by midday. Wendy and Dipper drove over to Steve's garage and spent a couple of hours in one of the repair bays pulling out the dents in her Dodge Dart.

Dipper had never seen that done, and it was interesting. They poured hot water on the dented areas, door and hood, and then used a rubber plunger—very much like one you'd use on a stopped drain—to pull the dented metal back into place. The hood was easy, just three or four tugs and good as new. The door, where Dipper had hit it when thrown through the air, was harder.

Fortunately, the damage was below the trim, which had not been bent or dislodged. The spot wasn't all that big, but it was deep. Steve was right—though they got the dents out, the metal showed a kind of wrinkle where the trough of the deepest indentation had been. Wendy donned goggles and used a sander to even that out—again something Dipper had never seen. He had not realized that a sander could be lubricated with running water.

Steve came over and admired the job, running his hand over it. Wendy had reduced the crinkle to nothing—though bare metal showed. Steve straightened up and nodded. "Slick job, Wendy You won't even know this ever happened. OK, I'll take care of repainting. The windshield, now—"

"Somebody's gone to get it," Wendy said. "It'll be here late this afternoon."

"I'm open until six," Steve said. "Have them drop it off before then, and as I'm finishing the paint job tomorrow, I'll pop it in for you." He looked at his watch. "I clocked you in at twelve-thirty and it's two-twenty now. Call it two hours even. I'll knock of seventy bucks. More if you want to work on some of the other cars. I always get backed up after Christmas."

"What do you say, Dip?" Wendy asked.

"Go for it," Dipper said.

"Good deal," Steve said. "I got some overalls I think will fit you both."

Nothing big—they changed oil and filters, flushed cooling systems and replaced the antifreeze, and once Wendy took a door apart to get a stubborn side window back on the track so it would lower and raise again. Steve's assistant snapped a photo of Steve, Wendy, and Dipper posing behind a stripped-down engine that Steve was rebuilding and sent it to both Dipper and Wendy.

"Grease monkeys!" Wendy hooted, looking at it. "Now, _this_ picture you can show your mom and dad!"

By then it was past four. Steve asked if Wendy wanted a loaner, but she'd seen the available cars and thanked him but refused. Dipper called Teek's phone—Mabel answered—and told them to drop the windshield off at Steve's. "Cool," Mabel said. "We're nearly to the valley right now. Twenty minutes or so."

Dipper told that to Wendy, and she reached for his phone. "Then you can give me a ride home," she said. "I mean to the Shack. And we can decide what the four of us want to do tonight."

By five they were back at the Mystery Shack. Dipper discovered that getting his hands dirty while working on cars meant that clean-up was difficult, but Wendy had some powdered hand soap—it contained pumice, the volcanic ash, ground up fine—that got most of the grime out. Mabel—whose phone had died because she hadn't charged it in a few days—used Dipper's to call their folks, but she talked to Dad and told him about their day (omitting the previous night). When she hung up, she said, "Dad said he has a new respect for you, Dipper."

"The car thing," Dipper said, shrugging. "Too bad it won't impress Mom."

Since Wendy had worked off a good bit of the cost of repairs, they decided to go out for dinner and a movie. First they went over to the McGuckets', where Dipper reported to Fiddleford their success at immobilizing the Killbilly. "After we trapped the thing, it was so late," Dipper said, "we just stayed over at the Shack. We figured it was OK, since we chaperoned each other."

"Fine as frog hair with me," Fiddleford said. "Glad you got that consarned critter off your trail. They can be a bigger handful than a pound of fishin' worms."

And he was OK with their going into town for a meal and a movie. The dinner was pretty good, nothing great, but it felt fine to be eating at Greasy's again. The movie was a Star Wars film that they liked—again good, not great—and after it ended, they bopped around a little, admiring the Gravity Falls Christmas lights, still up until New Year's. At last Teek dropped Wendy off—"I'll come back tomorrow afternoon so you can get your car," he promised—and Dipper said he would come to the Shack when he ran the next morning.

That night, in his room in the McGucket house, Dipper sighed as he nestled down to rest.

Too bad the only thing he had to hug was his pillow. But it had been a good morning and a good day, and he was tired in a good way. It was all good.

And he looked forward to pleasant dreams.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9: The Drolldrums**

* * *

 **(December 29, 2015)**

Tuesday morning the weirdness meter showed a little bump, up to 1400, but still well under the red danger line. Dipper dutifully recorded the reading and texted it to Grunkle Ford, off in Hawaii. He and Wendy did their run, and then at her suggestion, he walked back to the McGucket mansion, pausing along the way to speak to several people who were downtown—Gideon and Ulva, doing some post-Christmas shopping, Toby Determined, and Candy, among others.

He spent all morning updating his Journal. At two in the afternoon, Teek came by the McGucket house with Wendy, on her way to the garage, and Mabel and Dipper went along for the ride.

Steve greeted them with a broad grin. "Good timing," he said when they walked in. "She just got out of the tanning salon!"

The Dodge Dart, with its replacement, tinted windshield, sat in the bay looking pristine. "Good job, man!" Wendy said, hunkering down next to the door to sight along it. "Smooth as anything. Looks brand-new."

"Yeah, well, don't put any polish or anything on it for sixty days," Steve warned, wiping his hands on a pink cloth. "Clear-coat needs to cure, and in chilly weather I'd say that's the minimum, two months. Give her until the first of March. You can wash her, though. Any imperfections pop up, bring it back in and I'll fix 'em. Why don't you go to work for me, Wendy? Two of the cars you worked on, the customers raved about how good a job I did on 'em!"

"Thanks, man, but it's just a hobby with me," Wendy said, grinning.

Dipper looked at the door, amazed at how well the paint job had turned out. He couldn't see any difference in color between the repainted door and the rest of the car. He reached out, then paused. "OK to touch it?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah, it's dry. Might be a little hot after the infra-reds."

Very warm, but not actually hot. And smooth as ice. "My dad would want to talk shop with you," he said to Steve. "You're like an artist!"

"Your dad in the car biz?" Steve asked.

Dipper laughed. "No, IT. But he loves cars."

"When he comes to town, tell him to drop in," Steve said. "The newer cars, their computers, I might put him to work!"

"Let's settle up," Wendy said. "What do I owe you?"

Because of Wendy's volunteer work and a good buy on the windshield, it came out to significantly less than the initial estimate. She wrote the check and said, "Thanks, man. I appreciate the quick service!"

"Pleasure to work on one that's been restored so nice," Steve said. "Drive carefully, now!"

Teek and Mabel had been wandering around the garage, looking at cars, and Mabel had been telling Teek all about her car—the used Carino. Dipper overheard. "It's not really hers," he told Teek. "It's ours."

"Well," Mabel conceded, "sometimes I do let him drive it."

"I got wheels again! What'll we do to celebrate?" Wendy asked. "Any ideas?"

Teek grinned. "Better do it today. Mom and Dad are due back home tomorrow."

"Roof time!" Mabel said.

Chuckling, Wendy told her, "Not a good idea when there's ice up on the roof and the wind's so cold. I hear the road's clear up to Lookout Point, though. If you want a view, we can ride up there."

Separately, they went back to the Shack, where Teek parked his car, and then Wendy drove them all up to the parking overlook that—on warm spring and summer nights—were a favorite hangout for teen couples. Not so tempting on a day with the temperature hovering not much above freezing, though.

The valley still held enough snow to be a wintry postcard. They got out and wandered around, pointing out sights and sites—"That's where the Gnomes staked me down to the ground!" Mabel said, pointing. "Well—over there in those woods somewhere, anyhow. And I thought five of them were so awesome when they were pretending to be Norman!" She giggled. "Dipper thought they were a zombie!"

"Gnomes was my first guess," Dipper mumbled.

"Oh, so that's how you got the idea for the book!" Teek said.

Dipper shrugged, and Mabel said, "He gets all shy when that's brought up."

"I think I can see the entrance to the Manotaurs' man-cave," Dipper said, shading his eyes and looking toward the mountains. "Wonder how they're doing?"

"They're probably doing fine," Wendy said, her hands in her jacket pockets. "That's in the thermal area. Those caves have, like, steam heat. You know in the winter their females join them. Rest of the year, they're scattered out in the high meadows grazing."

"I don't think I've ever seen a female Manotaur," Teek said.

"Not many people ever do see them. Meh, they're smaller than the males and a lot gentler and quieter. Eight months out of the year, they form their own herd and wander around the meadows. That's mostly 'cause they can't stand the males for that long at a stretch!" Wendy said.

"You've met them?"

"Seen them," Wendy corrected. "They don't trust humans, and they scatter quick if they sense one anywhere around. Way back in the nineteenth century, the pioneers sometimes hunted them. I hope the humans didn't realize they were sentient and could talk and all."

Mabel shivered. "That's cruel!"

"Yeah. Anyhow, the winter is mating season, so they come back to the cave to get together with the males. They stay pregnant for nearly a year. The earliest females to come back to the cave give birth there, and gradually the rest come in."

As the sun sank lower, a chilly wind sprang up, and the four teens gratefully climbed back into the car and rode down to the valley floor again. "Come over to the McGuckets' for dinner," Mabel urged Wendy and Teek. "They want you to come."

"They're not expecting us," Teek said.

"They've already told us to ask you both," Dipper said. "We have time to call and make sure. Come on."

"OK, if we're not imposing," Wendy said.

Mabel phoned Mayellen, who was happy to invite them. Since Fiddleford had built six cookamabots, generally Mayellen didn't have to do much in the kitchen other than a general supervision. The culinary robots took care of the rest, including preparation, presentation, and clean-up. Mayellen gently complained that the food was perfect—but somehow lacking.

"'Cause the secret ingredient isn't there!" Mabel had told her. "Love!"

However, that meal was a good and tasty one, and afterward the four teens went into the game room—Fiddleford hadn't had it redecorated because he had not found it until recently—and played a few vintage video games, all dating back to 2012 (when the Northwests had to move out) or earlier. Around nine, Wendy said she'd better go back to the Shack for the night, and she and Dipper said their goodbyes.

Dipper was writing up an account of the afternoon in his latest Journal fifteen minutes later when she called. "Dip," she said, "hate to ask this, but something weird's going on here. Can you come over and see what you think?"

"Yeah," Dipper said at once. He found Fiddleford and asked if he could borrow the McGuckets' car.

"Take the WarMobile," Fiddleford said, fishing out a key. "Been meanin' to test drive it anyways. Just don't flip down the red dash compartment or touch any of the buttons hid under it. I disremember if I loaded ammo or not."

That made Dipper nervous. "The warm-mobile?" he asked. "Or the war-mobile?"

"Either one!" Fiddleford said happily. "It's got a powerful flamethrower!"

It was easy to tell which was the WarMobile—it had been built on the chassis of a Jeep and painted a glossy black. Dipper climbed in, turned the key in the ignition, and muttered, "Here goes! Yahh!"

The "Yahh" was because Mabel had jumped in beside him. "Charge!" she yelled like Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill.

The WarMobile lurched, but Dipper jammed his foot on the brake. "Mabel, Wendy asked me—"

"Yeah, I overheard by accident," Mabel said innocently. "Come on! She may be in the clutches of something or other!"

Dipper put the WarMobile in gear—he didn't have to open the garage door, because that happened automatically—and cautiously pulled out into the circular drive.

A droning mechanical voice asked, "What is the objective?"

"Mystery Shack!" Mabel yelled. "On the double!"

The mechanical voice replied, "Hyperdrive engaged."

"Whoa!" The steering wheel jerked out of Dipper's control, the car took over, and in less than a minute, it screeched to a stop in the Shack parking lot.

"Let's do that again!" Mabel yelled. Dipper didn't even have time to yell "No!" or to unclench his fingers from the steering wheel.

Two minutes later, the WarMobile came to a stop again, after having raced through the streets back to the McGuckets', then back to the Shack.

"Don't say _anything_!" Dipper warned Mabel.

The WarMobile asked politely, "Destroy the objective? Yes or no."

"No! _Big_ no! Don't destroy _anything._ Give me full manual control until a direct command from me! Uh, power down!" Dipper ordered.

"Yes, sir!"

Gingerly, Dipper got out of the vehicle and insisted Mabel follow.

Wendy met them at the door, looking worried. "What's _that,_ dudes?"

"McGucket made it," Dipper said. "I'm not sure if it's a tank or a weapon or just something insane."

"Gotcha."

Mabel chirped, "What's up?"

"Come and look," Wendy said, leading them into the gift shop. "It ain't pretty."

"Whoa!" Mabel exclaimed as they stood in the doorway. "Who did this?"

"Don't know," Wendy said. "It's gonna be a major pain to clean up. Dip? What's wrong?"

What was wrong was that Dipper was steaming mad. With what looked like red and blue spray paint, someone had marked all over the walls, the floor, the counter, even the cash register. And what they had put up wasn't ordinary graffiti, but nasty personal remarks: REDHEADS STINK. UGLY MEANS TOO TALL TOO SKINNY TOO FRECKLED. All over the place was a whole rash of one-word comments started out with the SL- word and got worse.

"I'll kill them," Dipper growled, balling his hands into fists.

"Hey, hey, Dip," Wendy said. "It's just somebody trying to get at me, dude. If I don't let them do that, they've failed."

"Uh—guys?" Mabel said, sounding unhappy. "You might want to look at this."

She was pointing at the vending machine. Dipper felt goosebumps on his arms. As he watched, another mean message appeared letter by letter, as though being spray-painted in red by an invisible ghost: MABEL IS A FATTY.

He said, "I'm gonna check something." He tapped in the code on the vending machine keypad and went down to Ford's lab. The weirdness detector hummed, and he quickly took a reading. Since that morning, the weirdness level had shot up to over 8,500. Dipper called Ford.

"Yes, Mason?" Ford answered.

"Great-Uncle Ford, something's going on," Dipper said. "The register's shot way up to 8,557 milliweirds, just since this morning. And something invisible is writing insults on the walls and things."

"Give me details," Ford said urgently.

Dipper did, and as he was speaking, blue letters appeared on the cubicle wall where Ford kept the phone. Dipper said, "Right now I see words forming down here in the lab. About me. D-I-P-P-E-R, I-S, P-U-S—agh. It's—basically, it's accusing me of being, uh, pushed around by Wendy, I guessed, but it's, you know, vulgar."

"This isn't good. Sounds like the work of drolls," Ford said in a serious voice.

"Trolls?"

" _Drolls,_ with a d, like in deoxyribose," Ford said. "Dimensional trolls. I ran into them last winter. There's an entry about them in my Journal 6—oh, wait, you can't consult it because I've got that with me here in Hawaii. Anyway, they're a little like poltergeists, but a lot more like jerks."

"Some kind of ghost?"

"No," Ford said. "Trans-dimensional, but they have a physical existence, though they can phase in and out of our visual range. When one if them leaks through into our dimension, it finds a locus of weirdness, nests, and reproduces. You've probably got an infestation of them right in the Shack. It would be an ideal spot for them to breed."

"How do we get rid of them?"

"You must find the nest and destroy it with fire. It won't be large. Once the nest is gone, the creatures lose their—anchor, I suppose you'd call it—in our dimension and they pop out of existence."

"What does a nest look like?"

"Um, well, the one I found was near the Bottomless Pit, lodged beneath a fallen tree trunk. Shaped sort of a rough, messy ball. It was only about twenty-five centimeters across—oh, that's—"

"A little under ten inches, I know," Dipper said. "What's it made of?"

"This one was made up of twigs, leaves, some fur, probably rabbit, and, um, possessions. Mine and Lorena's."

"What possessions?" Dipper asked.

"Well, socks and—um, feminine underthings, and bits of clothing like that. The first droll that breaks through seems to steal things from the nearest weird location and then constructs the nest, and before a week's gone by, the messages start to appear, focused on whoever's things are in the nest. Search the Shack. If the phenomena began there, chances are good there's a droll nest. Don't let them get any stronger, or you'll be in danger."

"Physical?"

"Yes, but the psychic danger is more serious at this stage. The insults will work on your confidence and your certainly. Fight against that! If you give in to despair, you'll be an easy target."

"For what?" Dipper asked.

"Possession first," Ford said. "They take over your mind." Then, after a pause, he added, "And then extinction."


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10: Shaking Down the Shack**

 **(December 29-30, 2015)**

* * *

"Come on, Mabes," Wendy urged. "Snap out of it!"

"Agh! Nobody will ever love me!" Mabel wailed.

Dipper opened the door—well, opened the vending machine, a sentence that makes sense only in conjunction with the Mystery Shack—to Mabel's broken-hearted cry. He asked, "What's going on?"

"It's getting to her big-time," Wendy said, rubbing the curled-up Mabel's back. "I think we ought to get Mabes out of here."

Mabel had bowed herself up in the middle of the floor, in a fetal position. The spooky graffiti had nearly surrounded her in a circle: TOO SILLY TO LIVE. SELFISH PIG. FAT FACE. Worse. Tears rolled off her cheeks, and she shivered, hugging herself tightly.

"Come on," Dipper said, stepping into the circle. Like footprints, the writing followed him: FRAUD. DWEEB. WEAK.

Grinding his teeth, he leaned over Mabel and tried to help her up. She flailed her arms, swatting him. "Leave me alone! I always guilt you into helping me! I don't deserve to—"

Grunting, Dipper picked her up. Bawling, she clung to his neck. "I'm so sorry," she sobbed.

"Let's go," he said. He staggered out of the Shack with her, to McGuckets' WarMobile. Wendy got in, too. "Strap her in," Dipper said. "Then strap in yourself and hang on."

"OK, ready." As he clicked his own seat belt, Dipper took a deep breath. Then he started the engine and said, "I command you to activate. Home base, on the double!"

"Wow!" Wendy said a minute later as the McGucket garage door closed behind the vehicle. They helped Mabel out. She could walk, unsteadily, and they supported her. "S-sorry," she mumbled. "I—I'm no good as help. I—I—"

"It's not your fault," Dipper said. As they helped her inside, he explained what Ford had told him about drolls. "We have to find the nest," he said. They woke the McGuckets, who agreed to take care of Mabel—"Don't let her sleep. Call me if she starts acting strange," Dipper said. Then he added, "Not like herself, I mean. Call me right away!"

Fiddleford offered to return to the Shack with them, but Dipper said, "Better that we go. Wendy's nearly immune, and anybody else would be affected. I'll report back as soon as we find something."

The WarMobile zipped them back to the Shack. Wendy said quietly, "Dip, before we go back in—I'm _not_ immune. It's bothering me." She took a deep breath. "Am I too old for you, man?"

He took her hand. – _Don't believe their lies, Lumberjack Girl. You're just right for me. Look at my feelings._ He opened his heart to her.

 _Oh, Dip!_ He felt a surge of her affection and felt the old Wendy determination coming back in a flood of confidence. _OK, man. Let's find 'em and burn 'em out!_

And before they broke contact, she sent him a great wave of love. "I can do anything now," Dipper said. "Let's do it!"

At first glance, the gift shop had returned to normal, all the graffiti faded to invisibility. However, as they stepped inside, the writing started to show up again: DIPPER IS SCARED. WENDY HAS BIG FEET. Low-level stuff at first, but Dipper sensed it would intensify.

"Start in the attic," he said. "We look everywhere and we _don't_ split up."

"I'm glad we learned that lesson from Chadley and Trixandra," Wendy said, though her voice sounded strained and it didn't quite come off as a joke.

Dipper explained what they were looking for, a ball-shaped mass of twigs and scraps, roughly soccer-ball sized or larger. They went through the attic bedroom, stripping off the bed coverings—Dipper was surprised when he pulled the quilts and sheets off his own bed and found one of his long-sleeved t-shirts there.

"I sleep here," Wendy said quietly. "I wear the shirt."

On the wall: WENDY LOVES DIPPER'S STINK.

"Come on," Dipper said. "And ignore what they say, 'cause that—that makes me love you even more!"

LIAR!

"Ignore it," Dipper said again. " _They're_ the liars."

Nothing in the closet, though the wall held a message: INVISIBLE WIZARD STEALS FOOD.

"Invisible wizard?" Wendy asked.

"Probably imaginary," Dipper said. "But don't change clothes with the closet door open, just in case."

Nothing on the landing outside the room, or in the slant-roofed attic storage closet (well, lots of stuff there, piles of it which they had to sort through item by item, but no ball of twigs et cetera).

They went through every room on the main floor, even looking on top of the beams and moving the fridge and dishwasher out to check behind them. Nothing. And all the while the taunts and accusations grew cruder, meaner. "They're getting to me again," Wendy growled. "If they'd show themselves, I'd take an axe to them."

"They probably don't have solid enough bodies for that to do any good," Dipper said. "Come on. Where haven't we looked?"

They took everything out of the shelves under the cash registers, looked in the snack bar, went through Abuelita's room and the nursery and Soos and Melody's room. "Gah!" Wendy said as the message WENDY HAS NO TITS scrawled itself on the wall. "Shut the fudge up!" Except it wasn't fudge.

That wasn't like her, and Dipper grimly redoubled his efforts, though he was finding it hard to concentrate, too. "The labs," he said. "Has to be the labs!"

It wasn't the labs. They went through all of them, even the secret one that Dipper wasn't supposed to know about—small, eight-by-eight foot, crammed with—he hoped—dead specimens of awful creatures.

"We oughta get out of here," Wendy said. "I'm getting so mad I can't think straight!"

Dipper called McGucket. He said that no graffiti had appeared there. They were keeping Mabel awake to observe her behavior, but she had calmed down some.

"OK," Dipper said. "Last resort." He called Ford.

When he had laid out their dilemma, Ford said, "They'll keep expanding their nest if you don't find it. It must be in the Shack somewhere—at first, their radius of operations is small, focused on the nest. You have to keep trying."

"All right," Dipper said. "We will."

But before starting over, they retreated to recoup.

Down the hill from the Shack, in a clearing of its own, stood Stanley and Sheila's new house, not yet finished. But it had a roof, walls, and doors. They went there, carrying a lantern (no electricity yet) and huddled on the bare floor in front of an empty fireplace.

Dipper held up the lantern and looked around. "No graffiti here. Ford's right. It's gotta be in the Shack! What did we miss?"

"I feel so stupid," Wendy moaned. "I'm no help to you!"

"That's them getting to you," Dipper warned. "I'm supposed to be the smart guy. But I'm such a dummy—what's the answer? There must be a hiding place I haven't thought of! It's me that's stupid—"

Wendy shut him up with a kiss.

 _Together we're bigger than it is, Dipper._

— _Teach me something._

 _What, dude?_

— _I don't know. Wait, give me what you know about fixing cars! Anything! Everything!_

 _Uh, OK. Here it comes._

And as though it had been in his mind and he'd only forgotten it temporarily, the knowledge poured in. As if he'd always known, he now could tell the difference between—and operate—manual transmissions, automatic transmissions (he knew how to operate this one already, but now he understood all the components and how they worked together), CVT's, and hybrid dual/clutch versions. He could have stripped down and reassembled an engine. He knew about old-fashioned distributors and fuel injection, about three varieties of ignition systems, about—well, it felt like about everything.

He took a deep breath. "That centered me," he said. "Thanks, Wendy. OK, I'm not so unsteady now. Let's go back and this time—really look!"

They decided to hold hands as they searched. Maybe not so oddly, that helped. A lot. Their touch-telepathy seemed to baffle the drolls—messages like DIPPER HAS NO TITS or WENDY'S TOO YOUNG TO SHAVE only made them giggle.

They went through everything again. Same story as before: nothing.

Then Dipper thought to Wendy, — _Where's the last place they think we would look?_

 _Dunno, man. I mean, we even checked out the roof!_

Slippery and icy though it was, they had—Soos had re-shingled the roof, but he'd also replanted patches of moss, and as always, the roof collected sheaves of pine needles. Dipper had thought that the nest might be disguised as one of those, but in the glow of the floodlights over the MYSTERY HACK sign, he and Wendy dislodged them all, every last one, and tossed them to the ground. Then they climbed down and made a visual inspection beneath all the eaves and on the porch beams. No nest.

But though their touch dulled the assault, they could still feel it—the invisible creatures were trying to force a way into their minds. And each could tell the other was slowly losing ground.

At two in the morning, they collapsed on the floor of the parlor. "This is stupid!" Dipper muttered as the wall replied NO YOUR STUPID.

"Can't even spell," Wendy snarled.

"OK, let me think. Let's go downstairs and get a couple of Great-Uncle Ford's anomaly detectors. Maybe the nest will register on that."

It was a good idea. It would have been brilliant, had it worked.

Well—it worked to a very limited degree. It showed that something anomalous was indeed going on in the Shack (thanks a heap, Grunkle Ford), but the detectors couldn't absolutely localize the effects.

The readings were stronger in the living room, though. "Gotta be here somewhere," Dipper muttered. They turned over the sofa and stripped the bottom cloth. Not in there. They'd looked in the big fish tank. Nothing. They'd taken down the cat and owl clocks and looked behind them, along with every other piece of art or mirror on the walls. Nothing.

They'd opened Grunkle Stan's old safe. Business records and a moderate stash of cash that Soos kept there for emergencies. No nest. They'd taken up the loose floorboard in the gift shop. Ramirez family photos, for some reason. One or two old expired arrest warrants for Stan.

Back to the living room, back to the floor, and they huddled under a red blanket, feeling the early beginnings of panic. _What haven't we thought of, Dipper?_

— _I'm getting too tired to think._

Dipper stared moodily at the unlit fire that Wendy had laid but not started in the fireplace.

Wendy caught his thought and responded, _Dude! I didn't do that!_

— _Don't tell me—!_

Using the poker, Dipper knocked aside the tent of white pine kindling. Beneath it he didn't find the expected crumple of newspaper and dry leaves, as he would have expected, but a soccer-ball-sized conglomeration of twigs, pine needles, and odds and ends—some of the red yarn Mabel had left behind, one of Dipper's old socks that he must have missed last time he packed to go home to Piedmont, and—

— _Dude, that's one of my bras!_

Dipper grabbed a box of long fireplace matches and struck one. He held it out to ignite the droll nest—

The flame flickered and went out. And the next, and the next, and though he tried not to read the hateful messages that now streamed onto all the walls, Dipper felt woozy. "Hold onto me," he said. "They're getting to me!"

He felt Wendy's palm on the back of his neck. _Take it out to the parking lot, dude! We'll soak it with gas!_

— _Together!_

They grabbed the nest and, like two basketball players fighting for possession, took it through the gift shop. Wendy freed a hand to open the door, and they stepped out into the cold night—bitterly cold but mercifully dry, with hard stars shining overhead.

They moved the ball to the center of the parking lot and dropped it.

"OK," Dipper said. "Get the gas, Wendy!"

And with a bone-chilling grin, Wendy said, "What makes you think I'm Wendy?"


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11: With Fire**

 **(December 30, 2015)**

* * *

It took everything Dipper had not to scream. He wrested the droll nest, not heavy but dreadful, from Wendy's grasp and threw it as hard as he could to the middle of the parking lot. It rolled like a badly damaged bowling ball. He grabbed her wrists.

"Give in," she said. "It's easier, and it's the same in the end."

He grimaced and sent her his deepest feelings for her. Desire, love, worry, fears, everything, in a jolt.

She blinked. "Oh, my God, Dipper! What's happening to me?"

"They're trying to take us over," Dipper said. "Must be from touching the nest. We have to burn it!"

"I'll get the gas!"

"No," Dipper heard himself say. "It's important to keep this and study it—arggh! Wendy, they're making me say stuff—burn it!"

"Dude, I can't! It's like I can't remember what to put on it—what's that stuff called?"

Dipper grabbed his phone. "Hold my hand. Keep telling me you love me."

He felt the pulsation of her love override everything else. He punched in the number, and Mabel answered. "Dipper? Is it gone?"

He heard the panic in his own unsteady voice: "Mabel, you and Fiddleford get here now! We need you!"

She sobbed. "I—I'm scared—"

"Please!"

Dipper heard her gulp. "All right . . .."

Dipper, still holding Wendy's wrist, dragged her across the parking lot until they stood in a freezing cold wind on the far side. The arc lights were shone bright in the lot, showing the nest, stretching its black shadow long. In the sharp glare, Dipper could see writing appear on the pavement, inching its way toward them. "They followed the nest," he said. "Don't look at the writing! Don't read any of it!"

He felt Wendy's inner turmoil. "I—yeah, they're close, they're close—Dip, I don't think I could stand to burn it now—"

"That's them! They're trying to stop us. We've got to help them—no, no, we've got to—they're coming toward us again. We have to move!"

They fled again, barely outrunning the scrawling words. Dipper all but pushed Wendy into the WarMobile, and he climbed behind the wheel and slammed and locked the door. "Maybe we'll be safe here. Hold my hand. I—what was—Wendy, they're getting at me! I can't think!"

"What'll they do with us?" Wendy asked.

"Ford didn't say." He started the engine and steering with only his left hand, he pulled the WarMobile into a tight turn, then sped down to the foot of the driveway and quickly did a three-point turn so they leaned back, the drive stretching uphill ahead of them.

His thoughts cleared a little. It was as though he had driven out of a fog—things slipped into focus. His chest ached, as did his swollen eye. "I—I think if they—control you—they make you their slaves or something. Make you somehow transport some of them to a place where they can enslave others—I don't know. How are you?"

 _Little better, but I feel all sick._

— _Me too. Where's Mabel?_

 _How long's it been?_

— _Four, five minutes._

 _Not long enough for them to get here._

Dipper put the headlights on high. "Here it comes," he said. The pink and blue writing scrawled its way down the asphalt drive toward them. He gunned the engine and said, "To the back door of the Shack, on the doubl—"

They had already arrived. "Long as we stay ahead of the writing, I think we're OK. Maybe—I think Mabel and Fiddleford won't be hurt—they didn't touch the nest."

"I keep seeing these things in my head," Wendy complained. "Little stick-figure guys. Like a swarm of them, crawling all over us!"

He took her hand again and saw them, too, three-inch-long stick men, brownish-red, like ants. "Not real," he said. "Not physical. Not yet. That's why they need to control us—I think the nest is the only thing they can make in the physical world. They need us to spread and—I don't know—take over the world?."

His phone rang, and he had Wendy answer. As long as he held Wendy's hand, he could hear what she heard: Mabel's voice. "We're nearly there. What do we do?"

"Mabel, this is Wendy. We gotta burn the nest—it's layin' out in the parking lot, but Dip and me can't stand to get close to it. The things are in our heads!"

Mabel said something and Dipper faintly heard Fiddleford's voice. Then Mabel, frantic: "You don't have to get close to it! McGucket says use the flamethrower!"

"The what?" Wendy asked.

"Flip down the red cover on the dash, the one that says _Do Not Touch_."

"Got it!"

"The—what? He says the big red button on the left is the primer. Punch it! When the green light comes on, it's ready. The trigger is the flashing orange button. There's a heads-up display on the windshield that comes on when it's primed. Target it and—"

Fiddleford's voice: "Let 'er rip!"

Dipper's temples pounded: _You cannot do this. Get out of the car. Let us come into your mind._

"Aw, Dip, they're getting' to me again!"

"Help me," Dipper said. "I'll drive, you work the flamethrower. And don't let go of my hand!"

He drove the WarMobile around on the grass all the way around the Shack, knocked through the low rails around the parking lot, and, through watering eyes, saw the round mass of the nest—now moving, rolling very slowly—and said hoarsely, "Prime it!"

Shaking hard, Wendy punched the red button. Something whined. The windshield glowed with orange lines, showing a spider-web targeting sight. A circle marked the crucial bullseye spot.

The moving ball had nearly reached the center of it.

 _Stop now. You cannot do this. You must stop now._

His tongue felt frozen. He struggled to speak. From his watering eyes, the blackened one pounding, Dipper glimpsed the blurry green light, and beside it flashing orange. Well, if he couldn't talk—

— _Wait until I tell you, then—do it._

"I'll try," Wendy said aloud.

— _Almost . . . almost . . . now!_

"Trying—ugh! They won't let my hand move!"

— _I love you, Lumberjack Girl! Do it now!_

Wendy gave a desperate punch.

And the night outside the WarMobile turned into roiling fire and smoke.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12: Choice**

 **(December 30, 2015)**

* * *

Even inside the vehicle, even through the heatproof windshield, they could feel the heat of it. The bonfire blazed for two minutes or longer before beginning to die down. Where the nest had been now lay a charred shallow crater, the asphalt burned completely away, red-hot embers glowed—the aggregate, the sand and pebbles that the asphalt had bound together. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Dipper made out two figures over at the driveway. "Mabel and Fiddleford!" he said.

"We did it, man," Wendy said. "Do we need to make sure?"

"I'm . . . pretty sure already," Dipper said. "I know we must have hit that nest with whatever the fuel in Fiddleford's flamethrower was. The burned patch is about fifteen feet in diameter."

"Now I'll have to pay to have it re-paved," Wendy sighed.

"Let's go," Dipper said. He got out, still holding her hand, and she slipped under the steering wheel and stepped out, too."

You guys are all right!" Mabel yelled as she ran toward them. Fiddleford came more slowly, peering at the burned patch. "Jehoshaphat, that was one hum-dinger of a campin' fire!" he said. "How big a blast did you give the consarned critters?"

"Just one," Wendy said.

"Reckon that'd 'bout do her! That juice flames at near a thousand Celsius! Done a job on the parkin' lot, though, didn't it?"

Mabel leaped to hug Dipper, and he let go of Wendy's hand so she wouldn't overwhelm him. "Whoa!" he said.

And then—weird—he had the sensation of _something_ inside him, racing around in his body, something like a crazed mouse, fluttering and scrabbling. His head reeled. He pushed Mabel away and turned to Wendy, whose eerie evil grin had returned. She drew back a fist as if to slug him—

He lurched and grabbed her other hand. — _Hold on, hold on, hold on!_

 _Dipper, they're still inside me! They had me there for a second!_

To Mabel and Fiddleford, Dipper said, "Stay away from us! I think we—somehow—I think we're infected!"

He gasped out the story. Fiddleford scratched his head. "Never heard of nothin' like that," he said, "'Course, that there's more Ford's territory. Why come you're normal-like now?"

"Because we have this strange, I don't know, connection—"

"Mental voodoo!" Mabel said. "When they hold hands, they kind of merge their brains or some deal!"

"It's gonna be late even in Hawaii, but I reckon we don't have any more choice than a possum in a gator's gullet," Fiddleford said. "Let's get in touch with Stanford."

They went inside—no scrawls, good sign—and down to Stanford's labs. Fiddleford made the call, apologizing, but explained that it was an emergency. Dipper took the phone and spilled the whole story to his great-uncle.

"Remarkable," Ford said. "I remember your demonstrating how you had the talent of telepathy when that Numina business occurred. You still have it?"

"In a way," Dipper said. "But only when we're touching, direct contact, like holding hands."

"How long did you touch the nest?" Ford asked.

Wendy said, "About five minutes, I suppose."

"About five minutes," Dipper offered.

"Hm. And you did insulate yourselves, correct? You wrapped it with a towel, or carried it in some kind of basin?"

"No, just our hands," Dipper said.

"Oh, dear," Ford murmured. "That could be bad. All right, let me get off the line and make some calls. Put Fiddleford on first, though."

Dipper handed his phone to Fiddleford. "He wants to talk to you."

Fiddleford adjusted his spectacles as he held the phone to his ear. He didn't say much—just "This here is me, Stanford." From then on it was "Goshamighty! Them rascals? I see. Gotcha. Yeah, I'll do 'er." And those came between long pauses as he listened to whatever Stanford was saying. Finally, he said, "Bye now" and hung up, handing the phone back to Dipper. "Uh—" he said, looking uncomfortable.

"What is it?" Wendy asked.

"Well, kids, first thing, I can't let y'all go to sleep. 'Cause iffen I do, those droll-bugs might short-circutify your consciousness an' hijack your bodies. So y'all have to stay awake until Ford figures out some way to cure you."

"How . . . long will that take?" Dipper asked.

"He's callin'—well, you recollect them fellers from the Agency?"

"Not them!" Mabel said.

"Yep, 'fraid so. Ford said to tell ye that it's OK, he's done worked out some deal with 'em and they'll treat you fair and square and won't lock you up to study you or nothin'. Iffen it looks like it's gonna take some time—longer than you can stay awake—uh."

"What?" Dipper asked. "You'll have to shoot us?"

"Naw, naw!" Fiddleford said. "But there's a hidden bunker—"

"We know," Wendy and Dipper said together.

"And, uh, they's cryotubes there—"

"You're going to freeze us?" Dipper asked.

"Last resort, last resort," Fiddleford said hastily. "And that would just be temporary-like, until we can rig a cure, and then we'd unfreeze you."

"And we'd be OK?" Wendy asked. "Freezing wouldn't kill us?"

"No, no, no!" Fiddleford said. "Not at all. You'll be fine. Uh, probably."

"Probably?" Dipper asked, more worried for Wendy than for himself.

"Well, yeah, nineteen out o' twenty white mice that Ford experimentated on was froze and revivified with no bad effects."

"What . . . happened to number twenty?" Mabel asked.

"Uh, it busted."

"What!" Wendy said.

"Uh, it kinda slipped outa Ford's grip an' hit the floor and shatterfied up into little mouse bits."

"Oh, boy," Dipper said.

"So—lissen, I'll brew us up some strong coffee while we wait," Fiddleford said. "That oughta keep ya'll bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."

"Yeah," Wendy said, squirming a little. "But I already kinda got a problem . . .."

A minute later, in the guest bathroom, Dipper knelt in the tub, the shower curtain drawn, with his hand holding onto Wendy's. "This is embarrassing, dude," Wendy muttered.

— _Everybody's got to tinkle,_ Dipper told her mentally. _I can't see you, anyway._

 _Yeah, and after I finish, we're gonna have to change places, right?_

— _Well . . ._

Fortunately, Dipper was holding her right hand with his left, so they only had to do a dosey-do—figuratively, they weren't really square dancing—to change places. He caught a strange kind of amusement coming from Wendy.

— _What is it?_

 _Nothing, Dip, but guys really go for a long time!_

— _Way we're built, I guess._

They washed their hands—that is, his left washed her right and vice-versa. Scared though they both were, they got the giggles. As they were about to leave the bathroom, Wendy said, "Check your zipper, man."

And she reached over and zipped it for him.

"This," he said, "is definitely strange."

An hour later, after Fiddleford's appalling but stimulating cup of—well, it didn't taste like coffee, but it must have been, because Mabel went running around in the gift shop firing her grappling hook up into the rafters and swinging like Tarzan on a vine, while yipping "Whoop-whoop-whoop!"—anyway, after everyone had gulped down two cups of the stuff, Dipper didn't feel the least sleepy.

The Shack phone rang, and Fiddleford answered. He identified himself, listened, and said, "Sure, I can do that. Just a minute now." He studied the keypad—Soos had finally replaced all the old rotary phones with new ones—and punched a button. "That do her?"

Stanford's voice came from the speaker: "I don't know. Can you all hear me?"

"Grunkle Ford!" Mabel yelled. "I love you, man! I think I'm drunk!" She fell on her back, kicking her feet in the air and giggling.

"You're on speaker," Dipper said. "What have you found out?"

"Just a second. Agent Powers?"

"Here, sir."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Mabel yelped. "Not Mr. Baldy! How's your 'stache, Mr. Powers?"

"I'm here," the man's voice said after a short but tense pause.

"All right. The Agency has had some experience with these things. I'm going to tell you what steps we need to take, and Agent Powers will correct any mistakes I make."

"Yes, sir."

"Listen, then." Ford took a deep breath. "It's difficult. Because you touched the nest for so long, bare skin in contact with it, you've become infected with at least one of the drolls. They are—it's a difficult concept, I'm sorry, I can't be very clear—they are virtually inside your bodies. Not actually. That is, their physicalities are still within the reference space of their own dimension, not here on Earth, but they have a kind of psychic anchor lodged in you. The drolls' essences, their, oh, for a better word spirits, are locked in null-space between Dimension D207—the drolls' dimension—and ours. They will stick with you—drolls don't ever sleep—unless we can jar them out."

"How do we do that?" Wendy asked.

"Agent Powers?" Ford asked.

"We aren't sure," the man said. "We do know that if the infected person dies, the link is broken and the droll dies at the same time—its consciousness cannot return to its own dimension, and the link is broken."

"Hold on!" Mabel said, her voice shocked. "You're gonna cure my Brobro and Wendy by _killing them_? Not cool!"

"Not necessarily," Powers said. He hesitated. "Perhaps the affected person should leave the room."

"You kids skedaddle up to th' attic," Fiddleford said, his expression troubled. "Don't fret none. We're a-gonna find a way out of this."

"Come on," Dipper said. He and Wendy walked hand in hand up the stairs and to his old room. They sat on the bed.

Wendy said, "Oh, Dip, I'm so sorry I got you into this."

"We'll find a way out," Dipper assured her. "It'll be all right."

They leaned together, holding hands tightly, as if their lives depended on their grip. Which, in a way, they did.

* * *

"I am not leaving!" Mabel insisted, balling her fists. "Not when you're talking about what you're talking about!"

"Mabel," Ford said, "I think we may have a way of curing them. But it will be drastic, and you won't like it. Please, let us discuss it without you. I give you my word we have Dipper's and Wendy's well-being at heart. Trust me."

Mabel felt a sharp pang. _Trust me._ Fateful words.

Her voice trembled: "Grunkle Ford, swear to me—swear! That you're gonna find some way not to kill Dipper and Wendy. Not even to hurt them!"

Gently, Ford said, "I swear that we'll try our very best. I can't swear anything else and be honest with you. Trust me, please."

"Fine," she said, biting her lip. She left the gift shop and went back to the guest room, where she sat on the floor with her head leaned back against the door.

Because sometimes that way she could pick up voices.

* * *

"I can rig it up," Fiddleford said. "Take me couple of hours. Be ready not long afore sun-up. But I hate to do this!"

"I hate to ask you," Ford said. "If I could, I'd fly straight there and take this off your hands, but there's no way I can get there in time. They'll have to sleep, and if they sleep, I'm afraid we'll lose them. Powers, how certain are you that this will work?"

"Just a second. I'm calculating. All right—better than a fifty-fifty chance. A lot depends on how brave the kids are."

"But if we don't try—"

"Like you said, sir. We'll lose them." Silence grew like a puddle beneath a light rain shower. "Should I dispatch the ready crew, just in case?"

Heavily, Ford said, "Negative. I take full responsibility. But stand by in case Fiddleford calls you. Be at alpha alert."

"Understood, sir. Good luck."

"Thank you."

When Powers signed off, Ford said, "Fiddleford, I'm depending on you. Send Mabel up to keep Mason and Wendy company and to make sure they don't go to sleep. Or let go of each other's hands! That's vital."

"Mabel will keep 'em awake, but I don't think anything could make 'em let go their holt on each other," Fiddleford said.

"Very good," Ford told him. "See to that. Then you get everything ready."

"I will, Ford, but you realize you're gonna have to explain to me how you got all mixed up with these Agency varmints. We swore we weren't never gonna work for them any more a long time back."

"The situation has changed," Stanford said. "But I promise, when we get back from Hawaii, I'll walk you through the whole story. Go on and—do what you must. And call me when it's over. No matter which way it goes."

"And God help us," Fiddleford said.

"Amen," Ford said.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13: That Fatal Kiss**

 **(December 30, 2015)**

* * *

It was past three in the morning. Skyping from Hawaii and speaking gravely, Ford said, "You both realize this is a huge risk."

Holding Wendy's hand, Dipper said, "Yes, sir."

"Got it, Dr. Pines," Wendy said. "But if the alternative—"

"The aliens would inevitably erode your wills. With control of your bodies, they could rebuild a nest and propagate, even gain physical form. And they'd have all your knowledge and skills."

"Then," said Wendy, "we gotta try it."

Wendy and Dipper sat in front of a computer in Ford's office. Away off in Hawaii, Ford looked terrible—his brown eyes red-rimmed and ravaged, a heavy dark five o'clock shadow on his chin, his hair messed up. "I—I wish there were some other way. But at least we have a chance. _You_ have a chance. But we must move quickly. Another day, and—"

"We'd be gone," Dipper said.

Ford nodded.

"Dr. Pines," asked Wendy, "why can't these things just control us now?"

Ford shook his head. "I have a theory, but it's best not to tell you at this point. I suspect that what you know, they know. Later, I'll bring you up to speed. Are you two going to be all right until—until Fiddleford's ready?"

Dipper squeezed Wendy's hand. "As long as we're together."

Ford smiled—not happily, but with a gloomy kind of pleasure. "You're a fine young couple. I'm sorry I got you into this by not giving you more explicit instructions."

"Not your fault," Dipper said. "We had to deal with what was happening and we did it the best way we could. But—why the Shack?"

"Because it's a strong point of weirdness. The unicorn barrier would protect it if these things were physical—but, contained as semi-independent intelligences within your psyches, they can penetrate the force field. As soon as I return, I'll have to make some—but I won't say anything else. We don't know what's going to happen."

Dipper heard a phone ringing, and Ford looked to the side. "I have to take this. If you'll be all right, I'll check back with you later. Give me a few minutes."

Dipper nodded, and the screen went blank.

"This is kinda screwing up your plans for college," Wendy said.

"No. Don't even think about stuff like that. Anyway, we'll get through this," Dipper told her. "We always have before."

His arm twinged and throbbed as though he'd just felt an electric shock. "What was that?"

"Dunno. Your arm jerked on its own. Whoa!" Wendy had suddenly snapped her head back, away from Dipper. "Dude, I think they're trying to make us separate!"

"Hang on!"

"I'm not letting go!"

"That's a girl, Red! I'm in here pitching, too! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Dipper's elbow locked, and his grip tightened so much he worried he was hurting Wendy. "Bill! What are you doing?"

His own voice answered him: "Saving your sanity, kids! There's a little wormy jerk in your head trying to take it. It didn't know you had company! Hey, I'm on your side, Pine Tree! Your mind goes, I go with it! Hang on, Red! Hang in there!"

Between clenched teeth, Wendy said, "Don't—call—me—'Red!'"

"Sorry!" Dipper said. "It's not me, it's—"

"I know, Dip! Still!"

"That's my ice queen!" Dipper heard himself say. "I love how tough you can get! These things don't understand love and hate. Keep feeling both of them, Red! Get mad at me! It helps!"

It was strange, like passing a phone back and forth, taking turns talking. "You don't know _anything_ about love!" Dipper said.

"Fair point, fair point, it's a difficult concept for a galactic overlord like me, but I do know it's helping. Think of kissing and cuddling with Red here! Think of getting jiggy! Is that the right word? I think I got that from Stanley!"

"That's private, you pointy jerk!" Wendy said.

"Yes, yes, let your hate flow!" Bill exulted. "Come over to the dork side! Ah-ha-ha-ha! See what I did there?"

Dipper said, "He is so annoying!"

Wendy nodded. "Yeah, but—the twitches have stopped."

Dipper realized he was gasping for air. "Yeah, they have."

For a few seconds they relaxed just a little, not that they loosened their grips. They still held hands as though their lives depended on it, and maybe they did.

"Guys!" Mabel's voice. They both looked around, Wendy over her left shoulder, Dipper over his right. Mabel had come down the stair from the gift shop and stood in the doorway. "I gotta tell you. You have to know!"

"What's wrong, Sis?" Dipper asked, trying to make his voice lighter than his mood.

Mabel ran up to them and hugged them both. "I overheard. I eavesdropped. What McGucket is going to try—it's all fire! That's the only way to fight these things!"

"We know," Wendy said. "Ford and Fiddleford have put their heads together to come up with something."

"Whatever it is, we've got to do it," Dipper said. "If not, these things will break loose in the world."

"But—fire—it's so dangerous!" Mabel said. "Don't do it! Just—just keep holding on to each other until they can figure out something else!"

"We couldn't do it," Dipper said. "We'll have to sleep sometime."

"Super Glue!" Mabel said. "Something!"

Dipper heard himself say, "Sorry, Shooting Star. They lose consciousness, they never wake up again as themselves. Say, meant to ask, never got around to it, how'd you like the bubble? Totes dope, am I right? Think I got that expression from Soos, dawgs!"

"Bill?" Mabel asked, jumping back. "You big three-cornered liar! Wait, I thought you were Billy Sheaffer now!"

"They seek him here, they seek him there, those Pines they seek him everywhere! Is he in hell or in the sky, that demn'd elusive Cipher guy? Bwah-ha-ha-ha! See, it's like the Scarlet Pimpernel. The, uh, the Scarlet—aw, nobody reads the classics any more. I'm here, Shooting Star, and I'm there! It's probably quantum. Hey, get this: I can only speak through Pine Tree because he glugged down a pint of Fiddleford's coffee. That really perked me up! That's a joke, girl! Coffee! Perked! I pitched it, but it went right over your hea—"

Dipper had been struggling. He blurted, "Shut _up_ , Bill!"

The computer screen came to life again, and Ford said, "Everything's ready. Go upstairs, follow Fiddleford's instructions, and good luck. Don't stop holding hands. We're all with you."

They went upstairs, side by side, Mabel right behind them trying to persuade them not to go through with whatever crazy plan Fiddleford and Ford had come up with.

McGucket paced the gift-shop floor, nearly looking like the wild-eyed loon of old. Well, he was a little neater, with a trimmed beard, and no longer barefoot, but the same look in those crazy eyes. "I really hope this works," he muttered, scratching his head. "Ford told me on the phone he'd done talked to you-all. I have to ask, now, mind. Are you goin' into this of your own free will?"

"Yes," Dipper said.

Wendy nodded in agreement. "Let's do it."

"And you realize it's a risk?"

"Yeah," they both said in unison. Mabel whimpered.

"Okee-dokee. Come on out with me. It's right cold, but you won't need no jackets."

They stepped out. The parking-lot lights had been switched off, but a ring of fire twenty feet across provided a flickering yellow light—a ring encircling the blasted spot where the flamethrower had evaporated the droll nest. The flames weren't high, maybe a foot and a half, but they shone bright in the darkness.

Dipper looked up. The sky overhead had cleared, black velvet spangled with stars. He didn't say, but thought, _Whatever happens, keep Wendy safe, please._

 _I got that, Dipper. Whoever up there's listening, take care of my guy._

— _Love you, Wendy._

 _Back at you, Dipper._

They stopped three feet away from the dancing flames. "All right," Fiddleford said. "Now, this here's my flaminating firemajiggy fulminator. It's like that song by old Johnny, a ring o' fire. It's just only on pilot-light mode now. What you gotta do is get into the very center of it. You can hurry through the flames quick-like and not get burnt to a cinder like the first flapjack, you know how you always got to throw the first one away? Where was I? Stand right smack in the middle, and don't let loose of each other. When I throw the switch, it's good night, Nelly! The whole circle fills plumb up with fire at a thousand degrees Celsius. I gotta time it exact. Maybe I can burn them things out with a flash and kill the flames quick-like. Y'all hold your breaths when I give the word, and I'll do my best. But if I'm even half a second off—"

"We get it," Dipper said.

"Are you _crazy_?" asked Mabel "You'll _die_!"

"Mabes, it's OK," Wendy said. "Ugh! I feel that thing trying to stop me! We gotta do this quick. This is the only way." She swallowed. "Listen, if—if something goes wrong—tell my Dad what happened. Say I love him. And tell him I loved Dipper."

Dipper felt his heart quailing inside him. "And—Mabel, you tell Mom all about Wendy and me. Everything. And tell Mom and Dad I love them. And, you know—Mystery Twins forever."

"No!" Mabel said. "I won't let you go!"

Fiddleford seized her shoulders. "Better skedaddle while you got the gumption," he said. "I'll hold Mabel."

He really had to struggle, because she tried to break away from him. Dipper felt his legs twitching as they walked toward the flames, and Wendy stumbled a little. _Dip, these things are tryin' to stop us._

— _Don't let them. I love you so much!_

They hesitated at the edge of the flame circle, fire dancing up to their knees. "I love you," Dipper said aloud.

"See you on the other side, man," Wendy said, her voice now surprisingly firm. "Let's go. Dance into the fire!"

They leaped through the flame barrier, the blaze licking their legs but doing no serious harm. They stood in the center of the crater, breathing hard, fighting the urge to bolt and run back to safety while they could.

"Ready!" Fiddleford yelled.

Dipper pulled Wendy close, and she kissed him, fiercely, holding him tight.

Mabel, breaking free, ran toward them, screaming, "Nooo!"

"Deep breath and hold it!" Fiddleford touched a remote.

And the inferno roared up, filling the entire circle, engulfing Dipper and Wendy in a searing, blinding rush of flame.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14: Didn't Light It, Tried to Fight It**

 **(December 30, 2015)**

* * *

The deafening roar of flame cut off Mabel's terrified shrieks. Dipper closed his eyes and hugged Wendy tight against him. They buried their faces in each other's shoulders and—fell to earth. Farther.

* * *

Darkness that felt incredibly cold. Nothing. Silence. Silence and the dark.

The two of them kneeling, clutching each other—or were they? _Dipper? Are—what happened? Why did everything go dark? And so quiet? Are—are we dead?_

— _I . . . don't think so. Bill? Bill, where are you?_

Dipper reached inside himself and listened to silence.

 _Is he gone, Dip?_

— _Can't sense him. But usually I can't._

He caught Wendy's desperate plea _: Don't let go._

— _I won't, Wendy. Not ever._

In the pitch-darkness, the two clutched each other, or it felt as if they did. And they wondered if it was real, or if it was . . . something else.

* * *

In the parking lot, the flames whooshed once in a roaring bellow that sent them leaping skyward, and then died down to tongue-licks of fire here and there, still outlining a wide, smoking circle. "You killed them!" Mabel screamed, dropping to her knees and staring in horror at the blackened pit. "Oh, Fiddleford, you killed them! You—they—not even their bones!"

"Hold on," Fiddleford said. He spoke into a phone: "Readings, Stanford?"

The phone was on speaker mode: "Hang on, checking via satellite relay. Background weirdness rapidly dropping. Through four thousand . . . three . . . two . . . starting to stabilize . . . one thousand . . . nine hundred . . . eight-seventy. Eight-seventy and stablilized, a good reading for Gravity Falls. Double-check that against the weirdness meter in my lab. It's more accurate."

"Level's dropped, anyhow. That's somethin'. How 'bout the containment chamber?"

"Checking that now. Same weirdness reading. All right, I think we did it. I should have built in a life-form detector! If it's cool enough on the surface, bring them out. I hope they're alive."

"I gotta look," Mabel said, trying to pull away, to reach the smoldering crater.

"Hold on, Mabel," Fiddleford said. "Stanford, I'll call you up again when I got something. Mabel! No. Don't go a-chargin' in there. That ground's still hot enough to roast you like a possum in a stewpot! Hold yore horses, gal. OK, just stand still. Here we go. Step back just a little ways." He thumbed a remote control.

Mabel heard a buzzing hum and felt a vibration rising through the ground. Clumps of melted asphalt, burning red-hot, stirred and then tumbled as—a metal box rose from underground, like an elevator. Mabel clutched her sweater just below the neck. "Are—are they in _there_? Are they all right?"

"That's what we're a-goin' to see," Fiddleford said gently.

"How—how did it get into the ground?"

"Used a backhoe-mabot and a loader doojigger. Easy to dig where the pavin' was burned away. Here she comes."

The cube rose up until about five feet of it stood above ground, smoke rising all around it and wreathing off the flat top. Fiddleford used the control again, and one side of the box dropped like a drawbridge, falling with a metallic clang. "Look away, Mabel," Fiddleford warned, shining a flashlight into the opening.

He might as well have told the stars not to shine. Mabel took a step forward, peering into the now-open cube. "There they are!"

Well, at least Wendy and Dipper were whole, not twisted, scorched, and blackened. They knelt face to face, hugging each other. "Kids!" Fiddleford yelled. "Wendy! Dipper! You OK?"

Shakily, Dipper looked around, squinting against the flashlight's beam. "We're not dead?" he asked.

Fiddleford chuckled. "Now that there is what they call a rhetoricamical question," he said. "Meaning that if you asked it, you done answered it! Come on out, but just only step on the metal ramp there. Everything else'll burn you bad, right through your footwear."

Wendy rose first and helped Dipper up, and then, holding hands and shaking, they walked gingerly across the metal drop bridge and onto the asphalt. "What did you _do_?" she asked. The air reeked with burning tar.

Smiling, Fiddleford said, "Well, first I planted that there portamobile safe room in the ground. Next, I rounded up a mess o' citrine laser lights and a powerful fog machine. I set down the fire machine. Then I fired up the ring of flames and set off the fog and the lasers, and with the heat and the bright yeller light, it looked like the whole golly-dang circle busted into fire. And the heat _was_ powerful, but immediate-like, the top o' the safe box opened like a trap door and you two tumbled in—hope the padding was thick enough—and then the top of the box closed up tight again t'shield you, and upstairs the full flame hit."

"We—weren't in the real fire?" Dipper asked.

Fiddleford cackled like a hen pleased with an outstanding egg she'd just laid. "Nope. Well, you _was_ in the center of a ring of it, but all around you was a cool rising mist and laser light. Relatively cool mist, I mean. 'Bout eighty Celsius, but you warn't in it for more than a couple seconds, not enough to singe your eyebrows. I hope. The safety box is heat-insulated, so I figgered it'd keep you cool enough to survive, and it holds enough oxygen for half an hour, give or take. OK, now you both need t'tell me, did we do it? Did we scare-ify them critters into turning aloose of you?"

Dipper looked at Wendy. "Dunno," she said. "Long as we're touching, I can't be sure. We'll have to let go of each other."

"Do it, gal," Fiddleford said quietly. "One way or t'other, we gotta know."

Wendy gave Dipper a weak smile. "If I start to go nuts, you grab onto me again." She broke their hand hold and took a half step away from him.

For a moment the two of them stood facing each other, breathing hard. Then Dipper laughed, not sounding at all like himself. "Your friends did it, Red! Nobody in here but Pine Tree and me! And now I'm losing my grip, too! Hey, treat the Sheaffer kid good, Pines kids! Don't know if I'll ever see you again! I'm slipping back into the Dipster's subconscious!"

Then, blinking, Dipper gasped. "I—it's gone. And Bill's gone. Or at least he's not kicking around in my head any longer the way he was. Fiddleford—I think it worked."

"Hot dang dogs!"

"Dude," Wendy said, putting her arm around Dipper's waist. "We lived through it!"

For a few heartbeats his throat was too tight with relief for the words to come through. "Yeah, but are you really OK?" Dipper asked as soon as he could.

With a big grin, Wendy said, "Find out!" And she pulled him in for a kiss. A hot one.

 _Well, Dip, is anything in my head but me?_

— _All clear, Magic Girl! Did I tell you lately that I'm in love with you?_

 _Right back atcha, Big Dipper! And by the way, I can't feel anything in you but you. Even Bill crawled back into his hole! What's my name?_

Dipper laughed, but only mentally. And he told her, — _Wendy. Not Red! Never Red. You're the one true Wendy._

For a short eternity, neither knew whether they were laughing or weeping. Either way—it felt sweet.

When at last they broke the kiss, Dipper cleared his throat and said, "We're fine, Fiddleford. The drolls are gone—but how? Did the heat kill them?"

"Nope," Fiddleford said. "Not sure they _could_ be killed, all disembodimified as they was. We just scared 'em back to where they come from. Stanford thinks fire kills 'em whether they're fully material or just loose drifts of consciousness, see. Me, I'm not so sure, but whatever. When the fire sprung up, _they_ was sure they was gonna die, 'cause that's what Stanford told you, and it was what they knew, too, since all they really know about this here dimension is what they pick up through the brains of them they latch onto. Anyways, they turned loose of you and scramdoodled back to their dimension. One-way trip, 'cause the nest is all burned up and now they got no anchor to this here dimension to drag themselves back. Stanford says there's nothin' crackin' on his instruments but background weirdness now."

"Come here, you two," Mabel said. "Group hug!"

"I gotta git y'all inside and put you through some scan-a-ma-doodles in Stanford's lab," McGucket said. "Take an hour or so. Probably sun'll be up by then. I reckon if the dry weather holds I can get my constructamabots to re-do the pavement out here, patch stuff up so's Soos won't be upset."

"He's never upset!" Mabel said from the middle of the huddle hug. "That's what I love about him!"

"Well, I'm a-freezing my tail feathers off out here," Fiddleford said. "Fire's all out now. Let's go to the lab and I'll get Stanford on the Skype thingamajig and we'll check y'all out just to make sure the drolls is real-for-true all vanishified. Just hang on for another hour."

"Man," Wendy said as they headed inside. "Don't know if I _can_ hang on. I think Fiddleford's coffee's wearing off. I feel like I'm about to drop in my tracks."

"Don't worry none," Fiddleford said cheerfully. "I can easy brew up another pot!" He glanced around, shifty-eyed, as he held the door open for the teens. In a low growl, he added, "Leastways, I can brew it up as long as there ain't no dad-blamed Revenooers a-lurkin' about!"


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15: Raining Fire in the Sky**

 **(December 30, 2015)**

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _At Fiddleford's insistence, yesterday morning after we took care of all the routine chores around the Shack—after Wendy, Mabel, and I had been thoroughly scanned, after we had carried one of Ford's heavy-duty anomaly detectors through every nook and cranny of the Mystery Shack and all around the grounds, after making sure that Widdles and Waddles had plenty of food and water, after repairing the doors of the tool shed, so much else—after all that, along toward noon, we all went over to the McGuckets' house. And there we crashed._

 _Wendy held up better than Mabel or I did, but even she was tottering with exhaustion. As we drove over from the Shack, Fiddleford's robots were already busily repaving the hole we had burned with the WarMobile—which Wendy drove back to Fiddleford's. She said it was nearly as good as a tank._

 _Anyway, I drove the green machine, and Mabel rode along with me, even though in California that would be illegal. Heck, even in Oregon it was borderline, because we won't be sixteen and a half for another month, but Fiddleford reckoned nobody would pay it no mind, as he said, and except for a few cheerful waves and shouted greetings, they didn't. In Gravity Falls you can marry a woodpecker and nobody bats an eye. I have to admit, I kind of like the laid-back attitude of the people here!_

 _Where was I? Oh, yeah, we got to the McGuckets' and crashed. Wendy didn't even get ready for bed, just fell down on the one in the guest bedroom that Mom and Dad share when they come to visit. I was in my usual room, Mabel in hers, and though a bathroom was in between us, I could hear her snoring and singing (she sings in her sleep) by the time I stretched out, convinced that I was still too keyed up to relax._

 _Six hours later, I woke up, Wendy was up already—she can sleep for three hours and be good to go for another twenty-one—but Mabel still lay zonked out and singing hits from Sev'ral Timez's Greatest Hits album. Wendy drove me over to the Shack—time to give the pigs their dinner and do the routine checks and chores. Both of us were sort of quiet and thoughtful. She said, "So, that's fire and water, right?"_

" _Huh?" I asked. I was scratching Waddles's back with a stiff brush. He seems to enjoy that in a quiet way._

Leaning on the roof of the sty, she held up two fingers. " _We've been through water—Numina's pond, and that time in the ocean. And now we've been through fire. What's left? Earth and air. Suppose the Fates have somethin' in store for us, dude? Testing our feelings for each other?"_

" _I don't know," I said. "I just worry that all the dangers we find ourselves in are my fault."_

 _Wendy laughed and punched my shoulder. "Then thanks, dude! Nothin' gets me awake and alive all over like a little danger."_

 _We went down to the labs, where I did another check on Ford's weirdness detector. The level was good, still under 800—797, to be exact—and though we did another walk-through with the anomaly detector, we found nothing out of the ordinary except in the attic bedroom closet, where, I don't know, there MIGHT be an invisible wizard. If there is, he's not talking. But the detector ticked up into the "MAYBE" area, anyhow._

 _We went out into the parking lot. Fiddleford's machines had not only patched the parking lot, they'd re-paved, and everything was smooth and level. No anomaly readings there, either. It was really cold, down around 20 degrees, and Wendy said it hadn't been even up to freezing all day. "Mayellen said we had some light flurries while we were sleeping," she said. "Nothing stuck. Too cold, not enough snow, and it all blew away."_

 _I was hunched into my jacket. "I'm not used to weather like this," I said._

 _"I like it, but it takes some getting used to," she said. "So, you and Mabes are flying back on Sunday?"_

" _Yeah," I said. "Late morning flight. I'm going to miss you so much."_

" _Let's go inside and talk about that," she said, taking my hand._

 _We sat on the sofa inside, warming up, and she asked me mentally, not aloud, about what was bothering me. I took a deep breath—_

* * *

Dipper took a deep breath. "I don't want to sneak around any longer. I mean about you and me, how we feel. That's all. I think we need to tell Mom about what we have."

Wendy made a face. "Maybe," she said. "That's probably for the best. Only—look, can we tell her, like, next summer? Maybe just before you turn seventeen?"

"Why's that?" Dipper asked.

She chuckled. "'Cause I gotta tell Dad at the same time. Yeah, I agree, it's about time we came clean with everybody. Heck, your dad knows already, and I flat-out told Steve Wheeler you were my boyfriend. Not that he'd spread it around. All he thinks about is cars—and Pioneer Day. He's the chairman of the re-enactors club, you know. Anyways, never heard him gossip about anybody. But still, people see us around town, something's gonna leak. I'd rather open up with our parents than have them think we're being sneaky 'cause we're up to no good. Yeah, we have to be the ones to tell her."

Dipper's strained expression showed his anxiety. "You'll tell her together with me? I mean, you'll be there when—?"

"Yep," she said. "But I'll excuse you if you don't wanna be around when I let Dad know. I can get away with it, but he might have an impulse to pound any guy I'm serious about into the ground like a tent stake. And he could do it, too."

"Hope he doesn't send you upstate to Steve's logging camp," Dipper said.

With a cheeky grin, Wendy said, "He can't. Not now. I'll be nineteen next May. Worst comes to worst, I'd just move out—but I know Dad pretty well. He's probably gonna blow up for a few minutes, but then he'll decide he'll put up with it and come around. He knows I'm saving for college, and he grumps about my night classes now and then, but secretly, I know he's proud of me. He'll believe that I'm adult enough to make up my mind about my guy."

Shaking his head, Dipper said, "My mom might not be so easy. I can see her lecturing us, telling us we can't decide until we're more mature—meaning me. Maybe 'Wait until you're at least twenty-one.' But when I didn't know if we were going to live through that fire, I thought she ought to know—"

His phone chimed. "Ford," he said. "Hello? In the Shack, why? Sure. Wendy drove me over is it all right if she—OK, give us a minute." When the call ended, he said, "Ford wants to Skype with us down in the lab."

"Cold down there," Wendy muttered. "OK, let's go."

They went down to the decidedly cool lab level and Dipper set up the cumbersome desktop computer—Ford still thought that the bigger and heavier a computer was, the better—and in a few seconds the Skype call came through. "Little more light, please," Ford murmured, obviously staring at his laptop screen. Wendy obligingly leaned forward and switched on the desk lamp. "That's better," Ford said. "Well, the two of you look all right. How do you feel? Any after-effects?"

"Not that we know of," Wendy said. "Should we look out for anything?"

"I'm OK, too," Dipper said. "Oh, we heard from that little bit of Bill that lodged in my heart. He said he didn't know if he'd ever be able to speak to me again, but I think he sort of helped fight off the droll that was trying to possess me."

"Mm," Ford said, his expression far from pleased. "Probably because he considers you his own property. I certainly wouldn't put it down to friendship. Is that still under control?"

"I don't ever have any trouble with him," Dipper said. "And I'm trying to sort of be a big-brother figure to Billy Sheaffer."

"You keep a close watch on him, too," Ford warned. "If he begins to act suspiciously, even in small ways, get in touch with me immediately."

"I will," Dipper said.

Ford nodded. "All right. I've been thinking about how the drolls were able to manipulate our reality enough to establish an initial nest. Did you photograph it?"

"No," Dipper said. "Not enough time. We rushed it out of the Shack to the parking lot and burned it."

"Where did you find it exactly?" Ford asked.

"The fireplace," Wendy said. "It was under some kindling, like somebody had laid out a fire."

"Aha! Squirrel," Ford said at once.

"Huh?" Dipper asked.

"Squirrel. They nest up in the trees above the house. And they can come down the chimney. A few times I've found them down in the lab. There must be a crack somewhere they can squeeze through, and they come in during cold spells sometimes. But this one more than likely squeezed down the chimney, past the flue. I'll bet you anything you'd like that if you looked closely, you'd see some sooty little squirrel footprints—"

"Hey," Wendy said. "I did see some a day or two before all this started—but you're right, squirrels sometimes come down the chimney and do that."

"Mm-hmm. Here's what I think happened: one of them was close enough for a droll to capture its mind and make it form the nest."

"It did look like a squirrel nest," Wendy said. "Except they're always built up in the trees."

Ford nodded. "The droll was directing it, but the squirrel's instincts made it create something it already knew how to build. Were any personal items involved in the nest?"

"Bits of clothes," Dipper said. "Some of mine, Mabel's, Wendy's, and I think some of Soos's kids'. I saw one little sock that was pink, so I guess it was Harmony's."

"The clothes led them into your minds," Ford said. "DNA traces on the clothing. That was the link. Once the nest was built and hidden, the droll would have abandoned the squirrel—not enough intelligence to make possessing it worthwhile. Dipper, go to the weirdness detector and see if the prototype Portal is plugged in."

Dipper did, came back and reported, "Yes, it's in and on standby."

"I am stupid!" Ford growled. "I'm sorry, but go back and unplug it at once, please. The prototype, not the detector."

Dipper did as Ford asked. "Done. Why?"

"Because even on standby power, the Portal gave the drolls a line on this dimension. The weirdness detector scans other dimensions, but strictly as incoming energy. Because I thoughtlessly put it so close to the prototype, though, together the two devices opened a—well, not a rift. We'll call it a homing beacon. The drolls discovered it and exploited it to find a squirrel. The poor creature is probably dead by now, though. The drolls burn through a small brain very fast."

"Should we look for it?" Wendy asked.

"Might be a good idea. Especially if it perished inside the Shack."

"We didn't find a dead squirrel while we were searching," Wendy said. "And we looked everywhere."

"Then it probably made it outside. If you do find it, just—well, dispose of the body. I'd burn it, even though a dead contact is no use to a droll. And as I say, they won't be able to home in on our dimension now that the line of communication is shut off. Now, about the killbilly—"

The debriefing took the best part of an hour. At the end, Ford asked, "Do you have any questions for me?"

After a moment's hesitation, Dipper said, "Wendy and I are in love."

Ford chuckled. "That is not exactly news to me, Mason!"

"But Mom doesn't know. And Manly Dan doesn't," Dipper said. "It's getting to the point where we want to let them know about our feelings, but—well, we're not sure how to do it."

Wendy said, "I think we ought to wait until next summer. Dipper and Mabel can come up again—their mom already agreed to that—and Dipper will be older and all. We agree we ought to tell Mrs. Pines together. And maybe my dad, but I don't know how he'll take it."

Ford said, "I've known Dan every since he was called Boyish Dan. He keeps up a very gruff front—but I know at heart he has a very soft spot for his only daughter." Very quietly, he added, "My advice with Dan is to ask him if you deserve to be as happy with the one you love as he was with your mother, Wendy. I don't know how much you might remember about her—but Dan loved her so very dearly. He won't begrudge you the same happiness."

"Thanks," Wendy said softly. "I'll remember that."

"Well," Ford said, adjusting his spectacles. "This is the first time I've ever given romantic advice! I apologize for overlooking that juxtaposition of my two devices. I'll address that the moment we get home again—we'll be arriving on the evening of the second, by the way."

"Mabel and I will miss you, then," Dipper said. "We fly back to Oakland that morning."

"I'll call you the next evening," Ford said. "But I'm so pleased you two were able to handle everything—and so sorry that I didn't caution you to wear gloves while touching that infested nest. I'll try to be more careful. And I deeply apologize for not warning you to handle the nest with gloves and caution. Please forgive me."

"Forgiven, Dr. P." Wendy grinned and winked at Dipper.

"That's all right," Dipper said. "We managed. But we thought we might really die in that fire!"

"You had to," Ford said. "So the drolls would think they were at risk, too. I'm sorry that I wouldn't let Fiddleford warn you. Well, we'll talk more about this after we're all back home. In the meantime, you two be good."

"We'll try," Wendy said.

When the call ended, Dipper re-checked to make sure the prototype really was off and unplugged. "Are you coming back to the McGuckets' to sleep tonight?" he asked Wendy as they went back upstairs.

"I probably should stay here," Wendy said. "Maybe look for dead squirrels."

"Don't do it," Dipper told her. "Let me do the squirrel hunt with you, and Just for tonight, come back and stay there. I'd feel better."

"Dip, everything checks out as clear."

"Still."

She smiled. "OK. We don't have much more time before you've got to go home, so, yeah, I'll stay over there tonight."

"Thanks." He hugged her and kissed her.

"Dip," Wendy said, chuckling, "Ford just told us to be good!"

"This _is_ good," he said.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16: Ringing in the New**

* * *

 **(December 31, 2015)**

Mabel could throw a party together if she were stranded on a desert island with nothing but one coconut tree and a few starfish on the beach. When it suddenly registered with her—"OMG, it's New Year's Eve!"—she went into high gear.

That meant a long-distance call to Soos—"Sure, dawg, you can have it in the Shack!"—and a bunch to friends of the twins and the family. Tambry and Robbie could come, and Pacifica and Danny, her ex-vampire boyfriend, and Candy and Adam, but Grenda was off in Europe with her fiancé. Not to worry. Each friend could invite one friend, or two if the friend was a couple, and by noon it looked as if they'd have a pretty good bunch to ring in the new.

Mabel, Teek, and Dipper went over to the Shack.

Wendy was outside, near the incinerator that Soos had built for disposing of yard trash. A fire in it had dwindled down to red-hot coals. "Whatcha doing?" Mabel asked as they got out of the car.

"Cooking a squirrel," Wendy said, dead-pan. "Nah, just gettin' rid of some waste." She gave Dipper a look that warned him not to mention squirrels again. Mabel had a very tender spot for animals, and she wouldn't approve of cremating even a dead and frozen squirrel.

They all went inside to help Wendy clean and move furniture and put up some decorations—they found the old disco ball up in the big attic closet, and Soos's keyboard. They could use Mabel's karaoke machine for the dance tunes and, who knows, for karaoke, too, if the mood hit them. A quick trip to the copy store netted them long streamers of colorful crepe paper, which they strung drooping and arching back up over the dance floor. Wendy and Mabel did a run to the grocery for plastic cups, tons of soft drinks, and munchies like nuts, crackers and cheese, and fruit.

Teek and Mabel prepared a couple of gallons of punch—Teek tactfully vetoing the platic dinosaurs—and they found the big genuine-crystal punch bowl and the fake crystal glasses. "We'll chill the punch," Mabel said, "And then serve it with a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream floating in it."

The phone invitations had specified casual, but that didn't mean Mabel couldn't dress up just a little bit. She planned her ensemble while they were putting the finishing touches on the décor. That included balloons, but no Silly String. And, oh, yes, Mabel had a brilliant idea—mistletoe! Wendy found a tree with lots of the stuff and retrieved a bunch big enough to supply half a dozen sprigs, which Mabel hung from the ceiling beams in strategic spots. "Mistletoe's still valid all through the Yule season! Last chance this year to steal a kiss!" she said, and she tested them out with Teek, who said they were quite satisfactory.

"I feel like there's something missing," Dipper said.

"I know," said Wendy. "We need a ticket table and then an exit fee!"

However, Stan was no longer Mr. Mystery, so they nixed those as soon as she thought of them. By three P.M., everything was ready for the New Year's Eve Party, which would begin around nine-ish. Some guests would show up earlier, some later, but that was nothing that concerned Mabel, and as long as Mabel was happy, everyone had a shot at being happy.

The McGuckets passed when invited—with thanks, but they were spending a quiet New Year's Eve at home with Tate and his evidently serious girlfriend, who had once dated Soos when Soos had exchanged minds with Waddles with the electron carpet that one time .

Mabel flirted with the idea of breaking out the carpet for party games, but Dipper warned her he would personally fling it into the Bottomless Pit. In addition to their own body-swapping, he had once wound up in Pacifica's body (not in an enjoyable way) for several hours, and, as he said, "That thing creates more confusion than enjoyment."

But nobody ruled out Truth or Dare, except Wendy. "Me and Dip are out of that one if you do it," she said. "First, we've got things we just won't do in public. Second, we've got our secrets and we don't want to talk about them. And third, we're gonna be the chaperones."

"Wha-a-t? Why not me, Mabel, as a chaperone? I'm older than Dip!" Mabel protested.

"Yeah, but you don't worry so much," Wendy pointed out. "Good chaperone's got a lot of stuff to worry about. Leave it to the expert."

"True, that," Mabel agreed. "OK, you guys can chaperone, but as the party organizer, I retain the right to overrule your decisions."

Dipper and Wendy, who had not yet fully caught up on their sleep, dozed on the sofa in the living room, the TV tuned to a nature channel and a two-hour-long program about bird migration on, but the sound muted.

After looking in on them, Mabel said, "I'm so-o-o tempted to take a picture of them—so cute, with their heads together like that! And look, Dipper's nearly tall as she is now. They're adorable! But," she told Teek with surprising forbearance for her, "I won't, though. I got Dip into too much trouble last time I took a sneaky pic."

When Dipper and Wendy woke up again, first they had an early dinner—nothing fancy, just take-out pizza and a big salad—and then Mabel sprang her surprise on Dipper: "What're you wearing to the party, Brobro?"

"Huh?" Dipper asked. "What I have on." That was jeans plus a long-sleeved red pullover.

"Nuh-uh, Mr. Fashion Crashin'!" Mabel said. "Come along with me, and I shall prepare you for the ball. I'll be your Fairy Godsister!"

They went up to the attic and when they came down after a few minutes, Dipper was wearing a burgundy cardigan over a black turtleneck. And looking a little shy.

"Ta-da!" Mabel said. "Does he get your seal of approval, Wendy?"

"Yeah," Wendy said with her lopsided grin. "Real sophisticated, yet casual. He looks hot!"

"Whatever," Dipper said, turning pink.

"I made the sweater!" Mabel announced. "My first cardigan!"

"Good job, Mabes. Now I gotta doll up a little," Wendy said—she was wearing her green plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and boots. "I'm gonna run home for some duds, be back in a few."

She returned around seven—by then night was coming on strong—and came in. "Did I clean up OK?"

Dipper couldn't speak at first. Wendy was in an ankle-length satin dress, emerald-green, and she'd upswept her shorter hair. She looked incredibly sexy—and sophisticated—and all grown-up. "You're amazing. You're so, so gorgeous and perfect," he finally squeaked. "Everybody's going to want to dance with you."

"Dip, you're gonna attract some girls, too. OK if we have casual dances with other people?"

"You know it is," he said. "As long as you save the last one for me."

"Deal," she said. "Always and forever."

No one, technically, was DJ-ing, since the karaoke machine could automate all that, but Mabel designed a playlist, dozens of tunes ranging from moldy oldies to more recent songs, like "Hello," the cover of "You Have to Believe," "Beautiful"—oh, many, many others. Mabel started the music around eight-thirty, half an hour of soft background stuff. Robbie and Tambry showed up, she in a rhinestone-studded purple dress, he in all black, jacket, pants, shirt, and tie. "Wow," he said, blinking. "Wendy, your hair!"

"It looks good!" Tambry—who had apparently abandoned her pink highlights—said, hugging Wendy. "And that dress looks so good on you! Hey, Mabel! Dipper, is that you?"

"Yeah," Dipper said, shrugging awkwardly. "Uh—how's the music business?"

"We're tracking up," Robbie said with a self-satisfied smile. "Great sales, and we're in demand for live shows. We can only do weekends while we're in college, but, man, wait until summer, and the Tombstones are gonna bust loose! You got any new tunes, man? I'm working on our second album!" For a little while, Robbie and Dipper talked music.

Pacifica and Danny came next—she was in all black, like Robbie, with extra-magenta eyeshadow and red lips, but Danny, the former vampire, was in pastel blue sweater and cream-colored slacks. "I miss this place!" Pacifica said with a nostalgic sigh.

Dipper gave Wendy a glance. He vividly recalled the time when Pacifica didn't want even to be seen in the Shack, which she called a hovel. But that was before Grunkle Stan gave her shelter in the dark days of Weirdmageddon, when, lost and dressed in rags, Pacifica had desperately needed help.

By a little after nine, more than a dozen guests had showed up, and more cars were rolling into the now-repaired lot. Mabel cranked up some fun dance numbers, and Dipper and Wendy did a pretty cool Whip and Nae Nae move. "Awesome!" Tambry said, snapping pictures. "You guys are so cute together!"

And Dipper danced once with Tambry while Wendy danced with Robbie, just for old time's sake (hey, auld lang syne, OK?). By ten the Shack was rocking with laughter, punctuated by occasional passionate kisses as couples found themselves beneath the sprigs of mistletoe.

They did karaoke for a change, Mabel really belting out "Let It Go"—so much and so well that nobody else wanted to give it a try. However, people kept urging Wendy to sing a number, and she finally said, "I will, but I want to do a duet with Dipper."

They chose "Lucky," which Dipper really didn't know well, but with the words on the screen and Wendy holding his hand, he picked up the tempo and the rhythm and key and did his best in his light baritone. He loved the images in the song of dream-to-dream loving—like their own touch-telepathy—and when Wendy sang to him in a husky voice, her green gaze staring into his eyes, he treasured every second of it.

They got some applause, but Robbie kidded him: "Don't quit your day job, man!"

More people tried the karaoke machine, lots of laughter and applause, and the party went on. Mabel did good. There might have been some discreet cuddling in odd nooks of the Shack, but the guests mostly behaved themselves without needing chaperones. Nate and Lee couldn't come, so there was no one to spike the punch, but that didn't seem to matter. By the time midnight came, everyone had mellowed out, and they sang the dopey old Auld Lang Syne song and hugged and kissed and toasted each other in ginger ale and punch.

Later, as Teek prepared to drive Dipper and Mabel back to the McGuckets', Dipper said softly to Wendy, "Happy 2016, Lumberjack Girl."

She nuzzled him. "Hope it's free of aliens and spooks for a change!"

"Aw, that'd be no fun. Hey, sleep in, OK? I'll be over tomorrow morning to help you clean up."

"That'll be nice. Gonna run over?"

"Yeah, I ought to stay in training."

"Bundle up. Gonna be a cold one."

"When I need warming up, I'll just think of you," he said.

She shoved him. "Man, you had too much punch! Get out of here. Tomorrow and then you gotta fly. Don't make me get weepy, man. Time for that later."

So—one last kiss, one fond good-night, and Dipper and Mabel walked out into the new year, both of them wondering what it might bring.

* * *

 _The End_


End file.
